It Could Happen Here Weekly 173

For a limited time at Verizon, you can get our best price ever for a single line.

Just $45 per month when you bring your phone.

Which is less than you spend on too-tired-to-cook takeout every week.

Get one line on Unlimited Welcome for $45 per month with AutoPay Plus taxes and fees.

Visit your local San Jose Verizon store today.

$20 monthly promo credits applied over 36 months with a new line on Unlimited Welcome.

In times of congestion, unlimited 5G and 4G LTE may be temporarily slower than other traffic domestic data roaming at 2g speeds additional terms apply from the producers who brought you princess of south beach comes a new podcast the setup the setup follows a lonely museum curator but when the perfect man walks into his life well i guess i'm saying i like you you like me he actually is too good to be true. This is a con.
I'm conning you to get the Dalai painting. We can do this together.
Listen to The Setup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Peace to the planet.
I go by the name of Charlemagne the God, and guess what? I can't wait to see y'all at the third annual Black Effect Podcast Festival. That's right.
We're coming back to Atlanta, Georgia, Saturday, April 26th at Pullman Yards. And it's hosted by none other than Decisions Decisions, Mandy B and Weezy.
OK, we got the R&B Money podcast with Tank and Jay Valentine. We got the Woman of All podcast with Sarah Jake Roberts.
We got Good Moms, Bad Choices. Carrie Champion will be there with her Nekka Sports podcast.
And the Trap Nerds podcast with more to be announced. And of course, it's Bigger Than Podcast.
We're bringing the Black Effect marketplace with black-owned businesses. Plus, the food truck court to keep you fed while you visit us, all right? Listen, you don't want to miss this.
Tap in and grab your tickets now at blackeffect.com slash podcast festival. Proudly sponsored by Nissan.
For a limited time at Verizon, you can get our best price ever for a single line. Just $45 per month when you bring your phone, which is less than you spend on too tired to cook takeout every week.
Get one line on unlimited welcome for $45 per month with auto pay plus taxes and fees. Visit your local

San Jose Verizon store today. $20 monthly promo credits applied over 36 months with a new line on unlimited welcome.
In times of congestion, unlimited 5G and 4G LTE may be temporarily slower than other traffic. Domestic data roaming at 2G speeds.
Additional terms apply. Call Zone Media.
Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here.
And I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.
If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again.
I am your host, Mia Wong. With me is James Stout.
Hi, Mia. Happy to be here again.
Yeah, I am. I don't know.
I have mixed emotions about this one. So today we are talking about how the American state, particularly the of of neoliberal American state of the last about 50 years, created Elon Musk and how it is destroying itself.

And we'll start with the fun part of this, which is that Tesla stock is down 25 percent in the last month.

Yay.

It's extremely funny.

The protests are working.

People are like lighting the cars on fire literally all over the world.

Like there was just a big rash in France the day we're recording recording this the pressure is working he's having a bad time 25 is just the start we can get the other 75 yeah i mean and like for people who like i guess don't know the value of tesla stock is directly tied to elon musk's net worth like obviously he's divers. He doesn't have all of his wealth in net stocks.
But like when Tesla stock goes down, Elon Musk gets poorer. Yep.
It's great. It's great.
We love making Elon Musk poorer. Yeah.
It's the one line we like to see. However, so we've talked a lot on this show about the things that Elon Musk is doing to the American state and about all of the people who he is harming and the lives he's destroying and the people who are dead because of his actions.
And I think it's worth actually getting into how he was produced and how it came to be that, you know, at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto, Marx famously wrote that the bourgeoisie produced their own gravediggers. And, you know, his promised, like, inevitable victory of the proletariat has thus far failed to materialize.

But neoliberalism and like this specific state seems to have produced their own grave diggers, partially in the form of Trump, partially in the form of Elon Musk. And it's worth actually going into the story of how specifically this happens.
and also I think what neoliberalism is

because this is an important aspect of

I think people are kind of

aware of the broad outlines of the story of the extent to which you know tesla and spacex were built by american subsidies but it's worth going into some of the some of the more structural elements of how this happened and why so one of the problems that have here, and I say we have here because this is a problem that Elon Musk has, which is that he simply does not understand what neoliberalism is or how it operates. Yeah, he says a lot of things he doesn't understand.
Yeah. And unfortunately, he has inherited like the greatest of all neoliberal states.
So the issue here is that Elon Musk thinks that what his own ideology is supposed to be, what neoliberalism is, what is sort of weird libertarianism, whatever you call his sort of ideology, you know, is supposed to be. And, you know, like he is just sort of a fascist.
But on the other hand, he's a product of this wing of that movement that was created out of the neoliberal thing about like, ah, you must like decrease the size of the state. You got to eliminate all regulations.
Youiberal thing about like you must like decrease the size of the state you gotta you gotta eliminate all regulations you have to you know keep keep decreasing the size of the state keep fire like you know fire all government employees etc etc yeah and again this is i think largely what a lot of people think neoliberalism is right they think it's like okay neoliberalism is when the state gets smaller and this has always been a fucking joke like through this entire neoliberal period the size of the state bureaucracy keeps increasing and this has always allowed a fucking joke. Like, through this entire neoliberal period, the size of the state bureaucracy keeps increasing.
And this has always allowed a kind of, like, controlled capitalist opposition to emerge to, you know, when 2008 happens, right? The entire economy collapses. And then out of the woodwork come all of these, like, Rand Paul sort of, like, quote-unquote libertarians who have a lot of sudden interesting ties to a bunch of fascist groups and, like, all of these sort of fascist paramililitaries but you know they can come out of the woodwork and say oh the reason that the 2008 collapse happened was because uh there was too much government regulation and this is like sort of what bitcoin is right it's like ah the evils of capitalism are happening because like not enough capitalism yeah well it's because like but like specifically like the evil and trench interests have taken over the state you don't have the power to access the things that they do which is obviously you know like it is obviously true that these people have control of the state and you don't but this sort of controlled opposition of if you put us in power we'll eliminate parts of the state we'll get rid of all this regulation that you can suddenly be in power this has always been a controlled opposition thing you know and this is this appears in the form of sort of libertarianism or like on the most extreme engine arcoco-capitalism yeah and this is something that the montpellier society which is like the the people who basically invented neoliberalism and where all like their academics come from they still have conferences they've always had a problem with this where there's always been a branch of a narco-capitalist there who think the only thing that the state should do is enforce contracts or just that it shouldn't exist and everything should just yeah and and the neoliberals are like, okay, you guys are fucking ridiculous.
And the reason they think this is that the actual thing that these people believe, and this is something that if you read more Hayek than just like the road to serfdom, right? That's like the stuff for public consumption. If you read the stuff that you guys for public consumption, if you read sort of like Rokeke and you read all of the sort of theorists who develop what becomes the IMF and, you know, you go through all the different schools, what they actually believe, contra the things that they say were like, oh, markets naturally emerge and the state just like exists to control them.
what they believe is that you have to use the state specifically to create markets

and you have to use the state to discipline workers through just pure violence until they

become sort of like good neoliberal market subjects you go to work go home buy things and do nothing else and the product of this is the 1980s right it's the replacement of the welfare state you know which is the sort of carrot of this system yeah with just the pure stake of the police baton and the prison system yeah it's the's the end of like the post-Second World War welfare state order, right, that we saw certainly in the U.S., but mostly in Europe, right? Yeah, yeah. But this is very important.
This never actually decreased the size of the state because what the state, you know, what it was, was it was a shifting of sort of recourses and allocation away from like the state giving you things towards the state, you know, like beating you over the head with a hammer. And also insofar as it gives you things, making you go through all of these unbelievable bureaucratic hurdles to access whatever sort of like scant welfare policies still exist.
Yeah, the state surveilling you both for violence reasons and for withdrawing your benefits reasons yeah and this and this is always something that all of these people have supported right now the other important part for our purposes is is the thing i said earlier about the state creating markets and that's that's kind of like an abstract thing right there are sort of historical examples you can go through to look at what this looks like in a place where there aren't markets. But this is something that's very important because a huge amount of what Tesla is, is a direct result of, you know, pure neoliberalism in action, which is the state stepping in to create a market as its way of doing regulation and the way it interacts with the world.
And so here we need to get to carbon credits. Now selling off carbon credits they're also called regulatory credits in 2024 the selling of carbon credits was 43 percent of tesla's net income 43 percent yeah so we should explain what a carbon credit is if people aren't familiar yeah axios has numbers on this their numbers are that since 2014 34 of the total profits of tesla are are from selling these carbon credits so the way the system works is that the epa sets standards for how much this is like you know read the axios thing too but like the epa set standards for how much like co2 per mile all of the cars and trucks combined that a a car company makes can can emit and you know instead of doing the thing where you're like okay hey there's just going to be like a firm cap on these emissions they're like no no no you know this is what what i say when i say they create a market so if what happens if you go over the cap isn't that like you know like people get hauled off jail or whatever.
What happens is that you have to buy someone else's carbon credits. And if you're below the cap, it gives you credits you can sell to other companies.
So what this allows is because Tesla only makes electric cars, right? Their cars produce like zero, basically. They don't have any fossil fuel use at all within their line.
Yeah, yeah. Now, obviously, like, whereas, you know, is that electricity coming from? But that doesn't get factored into it, which is part of the sort of problem with trying to use the state like this to solve.
Right, it doesn't look at life cycle emissions. It just looks at driving the car emissions.
You know, this is the problem with trying to use a regulatory state like this to solve the problem of climate change by creating a market. And so Tesla makes, and again, this was this last year, this was 43% of its net income came not from selling cars, but from selling these carbon credits.
So what they're doing is making it so that other companies can produce more cars that are less fuel efficient, can produce less electric cars and produce less like hybrids. Yeah.
it's why you couldn't get a plug-in hybrid ev pickup truck like i think there may be plug-in hybrid mavericks now but like the reason that no u.s manufacturer bothered to make an electric pickup truck like the f-150 lightning that they have now is because they could just trade with companies like tesla instead yeah and this is a fucking disaster for climate policy because instead of having all the car companies just like dramatically lowering their emissions what you have is one car company that makes electric cars and then all the rest of the car companies increasing the amount of like co2 per like miles etc etc yeah and the secondary problem and this is the problem that we're experiencing now, is that, you know, neoliberals have like this very sort of, in a lot of ways, like romantic notion of what a market is, right? When they explain it, it's like, ah, there's going to be all this like competition in the market. The competition is going to create the best product.
And what actually happens, and the neoliberals in their private doctrine understand this, is that when the state creates a market like this, what it's doing is handing like a person like a single individual a giant monopoly yeah and that's what happens and that monopoly is one elon musk yeah who has now been handed the title of the richest man in human history by the state's regulatory apparatus because they've given him basically complete control over i mean there are other ev only companies but they're my new right rivian or something like that and he's got this scarce resource that the entire automotive industry now needs yeah and again this is you know going back to the market creation part of this none of this shit existed right like carbon caps are not something the market would ever produce by itself or whatever like this is a direct neoliberal intervention into the market, which is what neoliberalism

is, right?

It's the neoliberal state coming in to create markets.

And the product of it is Elon Musk.

Yeah, it's a monopoly.

Yeah.

And when we come back from ads, we'll go into a little bit of why specifically it was Elon

Musk and not all of these other companies that became the sort of single guy and how and how else he's benefited from the state. We are back.
So the other aspect, you know, so we've gone into how how how Tesla is built on on these on this carbon credit trading. the other aspect, you know, so we've gone into how Tesla is built on this carbon credit trading.
The other aspect of it is that Tesla has received unbelievable amounts of money from government contracts. The Washington Post, in probably the last, like, expose they're ever going to do like this now that Bezos has been like, we are market capitalists yeah like tried to go through and find all of the money in government contracts that they've gotten they totaled it well i think i think they're also including like tax credits and stuff like that but they totaled it at 38 billion dollars and that's just the ones that are unclassified which is very important because a bunch of what spacex does spacex is know, most other company is a bunch of a bunch of contracts for classified like the deployment of spy satellites.
So it's definitely way more than that. Right.
Yeah. But this comes to the other sort of aspect of how Tesla functions and how tech companies work in general, which is that tech companies like in general do not make money.
Right. They hemorrhage money for basically their entire existence until they can find a bunch of government contracts

that can make them money.

And Tesla in particular was like really

sort of eating shit after 2008.

And, you know, WAPA talks about this.

They got a $465 million low interest loan

for the Department of Energy in 2010

that basically saved the company from the brink of collapse.

Good thing there was nothing else to spend the money on in 2010. No one else needed low interest loans or anything.
It was fine. No, no, there was no attempt to build like a giant American high speed rail system that Elon Musk also killed.
Yep. You know, nothing else was happening.
I wasn't living in my car at that time. It was fine.
Yeah. Thank you, Obama.
And so and so as this goes on, right, the goal of you as a tech company, there's two things you want to do. If you're a smaller tech company, you're trying to get bought by a bigger tech company so you can retire on your pile of money.
Or if you're a larger tech company, you are trying to amass enough U.S. contracts like U.S.
government contracts to like get you to sort of stability. And this is what happens with SpaceX.
SpaceX now has gotten 18 billion dollars of contracts with NASA and this is sort of a part of, I mean NASA has always used government contractors but this is different. This is just straight up they are using Tesla's rockets to do things and this is also part of why Tesla and Boeing fucking this up is part of why a bunch of astronauts are fucking stranded on the space station right now because these things do not work but there's there's been an enormous amount of money here and the other thing you know this is one of the other sort of like great neoliberal things is that a lot of the a lot of the factories that elon musk sort of builds you know the ones that are in the u.s are there because they get unbelievable amounts of tax breaks and tax incentives from local states themselves.
All of this brings us to, you know, one of the other really core aspects of sort of the profitability of Tesla in terms of selling cars. By the way, we should also mention, this is something Axios talks about, that like if they weren't able to sell carbon credits, this company would literally never make money.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. This has been the case.

I wrote about this like I think two years ago.

Yeah.

I remember writing about this before Elon Musk had gone full fucking evil villain, I guess.

But that's what they are.

They're a carbon credit company that makes cars.

Yeah.

But even their car sales are enormously bolstered by a $7,500 tax credit for electric cars. Oh, yeah.
I got some tax credit information on electric cars. It's now the time.
Yeah, yeah. Do you want to talk about the other one that's driving these unhinged sales? Yes, I do.
Because I have been driving around San Diego, and I have seen an obscene number of Cybertrucks wrapped in people's business livery. And it occurs to me that they're not businesses that need a pickup truck, nor do people who need a pickup truck for work by Cybertrucks, because they suck at being trucks.
And so I did some digging, and I discovered that the IRS has a special tax deduction for vehicles which are rated over £6,000 gross vehicle weight. The gross vehicle weight rating, if you're not familiar, that's not like the mass of the vehicle if you drove it off the dealer lot onto a scale.
That's the maximum operating weight of the vehicle as specified by the manufacturer. So it's your Tesla with...
I mean, there are very funny videos of guys loading one bag of compost into the back of a Tesla and being, it's a great truck for truck stuff.

The other really funny one is when they try to attach a winch to it

and try to use it to pull heavy things,

and the back of the truck comes off because it's just made of...

It's secured by glue.

It's in a unibody.

Yeah, it might not be a body on frame.

It might not be a proper truck.

I actually don't know.

I will look into that afterwards. I bet most of the electric or like high mileage pickup trucks are not so yeah not a good truck actually under it's called section 179 under section 179 a vehicle with a gross vehicle weight rating over 6 000 pounds you can deduct up to 31 000 in the first year rather than deducting depreciation of the capital good over time, right? So instead of deducting the depreciation of your vehicle that you purchased your business over time and not paying tax on that amount, you can not pay tax on £31,000 in the first year of your vehicle if it's over £6,000, right? There are some exemptions for luxury vehicles, like if you've got a Maybach or something really fucking heavy.
So that would even cover the Model X, right? A Tesla Model X has a GBWR above that. With a truck, there are exemptions for work vehicles and they have to have a separate cargo compartment that is not the driver's compartment that is six feet or more in length.
So the Cybertruck just happens to have a six-foot bed. Woo! Yeah.
So you can deduct 100% of value in the first year, from what I understand, for these vehicles which have a six-foot bed. At least this was the case when I was looking.
I became aware of the exact nature of this when I went on the Cybertruck Owners Club forum and looked what tax-deductant people were doing, right? And then I worked back from there. And it does seem that people are doing this.
I think it might be changing, so you can only deduct a certain percentage soon. It will shock listeners to hear that I'm not giving you tax advice, nor am I qualified to do so.
I'm not an accountant. This is not accounting advice.
On top of that, Mia mentioned the IRS Commercial Clean Vehicle credit, right? That's a credit, not a deduction. So the deduction would discount the amount of your income that you pay tax on versus the credit, which is just rate credit.
So potentially the person could deduct the cost of the Cybertruck plus the cost of wrapping the fucking Cybertruck right to prove it's a business vehicle. And then if you're wrapping it, from what I understand, like these deductions somewhat depend on the percentage of the vehicle's use that is business.
I guess this could be like the equivalent of a fringes on the flag tax theory. People claiming that when they're driving their Cybertruck to go to Whole Foods, but it's wrapped, they're advertising a business, so it's a business use.
I don't understand how viable that is as a claim, but part of this is like, it's very easy. Especially right now when the IRS is being gutted, it's very easy to do this kind of bullshit.
People are not getting audited. Yeah.
Yeah. So they can take a 7,500 commercial commercial vehicle clean vehicle credit in addition to deducting that much and like you would struggle to persuade me that that is not why a lot of people are buying cyber trucks right like it's got the weight rating it's got the bed size like it's a lot of people who wouldn't necessarily you know like not all trucks have six foot beds now i will never buy a new truck because i can't find a truck that has like a decent seating arrangement and uh larger than six foot bed and four by four and doesn't cost more than i earn in a year but like it's quite a like niche overlap of trucks that apply and like for a truck with a six foot bed and a six thousand pound gross vehicle weight rating the cyber truck's pretty small and it fits kind of with people who don't actually need a work truck, but can nonetheless take advantage of the work truck tax deduction.
So once again, thank you government for subsidizing the shittiest vehicle on the roads today. Yeah, and it's worth noting.
So like Tesla, you'll see a bunch of things about how Tesla is like one of of the like best-selling like car manufacturers right and part of it is from this but also you know and this is this is the other aspect of this it's worth noting there's a very good bloomberg article out today by amanda mole that talks about how 50 of all american consumer spending is now by people who in the in the top 10 of the So people make $250,000 a year or more. And that means increasingly that everything in the United States reflects the sort of cultural affect of these bunch of fucking rich assholes who all also want to buy this for their sort of cultural grudges and to own the li like show how like much of a fucking man they are yeah you know and and so you already you have that initial incentive and then you suddenly have all of these fucking tax incentives that you get from buying this vehicle that like definitely this is like designed with the shit in mind yeah without a doubt and it becomes like you said it becomes like a status good and it becomes like a culture war signifier yeah in addition to all those things I guess people also like I've noticed there's been a lot of backlash against people who own Teslas if you go on the front the day we're recording the top article on the front page of Reddit on the third article Reddit the top post is someone who's been putting pictures that say sell your car and it's got a a picture of Musk's Zeke Heiling on people's Teslas in Boston.

Yep, yep, yep.

Shout out to that person.

Yeah.

Okay, so we're going to take a break. And when we come back, we're going to sort of finish this off with a sort of larger structural analysis of how this version of capitalism created Musk and where it's going.
We are back. Now, I think this all, I think if you've been following Elon a lot, you've probably heard of most of this.
I actually, okay, you've heard of most of what I've said to some extent. I don't think you've heard what James has said before because I've seen very little coverage of this.
But there's also something deeper going on here. The deeper thing going on here is that Elon Musk, on a fundamental level, is also a product of the endless bubble economy that we've all been living in for decades now.
It's a product of an economic policy that the economist Robert Brenner calls asset Keynesianism. So regular Keynesianism is about having the government spend money on things like welfare programs and job creation.
Also, you know, also like the military too, right? Like let's not sort of like sugarcoat it, but it's about using a bunch of state money to like make there be jobs and using this to sort of, I don't know, the way they call it is like counter cyclical spending, but it's like they want to use the state to spend money, to make there be jobs and to put money into the economy and to put goods into the economy to counteract economic downturns. Asset Keynesianism is still the state spending a bunch of resources, right? But it's the state expending those resources both bureaucratically and in terms of incentives and in terms of sort of tax structures and specifically also very much in terms of the Federal Reserve's interest rates, specifically to increase the price of stocks.
And also, you know, the reason he calls it assets, right? Because it's not just stocks, right? It's also things like real estate. It's to increase the value of speculative assets, things that you buy because you think it's going to be worth more later.
I have talked about this a lot on this show. this has been the fundamental global economic strategy of most of the world's economies ever

since sort of japan kind of pioneered it in the 80s as after the u.s sort of like kneecapped its entire domestic sort of export manufacturing economy through the plaza accords and by the end of this fucking administration everyone who listened to the show will be able to explain what the plaza accords and the reverse plaza accords are when we stop it won't happen here after that because you'll all understand and you'll stop it yeah it can no longer you'll know you'll know you'll know the origin of the economy yes so again again the plaza accords the u.s forces all of these countries to increase the value of their currencies relative to the dollar this makes american manufacturing more competitive it nukes all of their manufacturing these countries need to find another place to you know develop their economy right and the thing that the solution japan comes to is real estate speculation this blows up this blows up in the 90s this is this is a whole bunch of the sort of asian market collapse stuff is from this and then the u.s is forced to do the reverse plaza cords in the 90s this is bill clinton and you know sort of annihilate uh american manufacturing in order to sort of prop up the rest like prop japanese manufacturing to keep their economy from completely imploding japan was the number two economy in the world at that point yeah but again this this means that the u.s has now been doing this there's the famous things called the greenspan puts were like to try to stop a market collapse that was obviously coming with a tech bubble blew up greenspan kept cutting the interest rates over and over again trying to keep the bubble from collapsing and just making it bigger and then eventually it blew up. This is what 2008 is.
We did a whole bubble. I mean, there's another bubble and collapse in between there.
But like, you know, and this is what we've been doing for the last two decades. Like since 2008, we've been creating this giant tech bubble.
And this tech bubble shit and this sort of asset speculation is also a huge part of the value of Tesla stock. It just you know people who've been given a whole and a whole bunch of access to cheap credit and by and by people i mean like not really you and me like a bunch of unbelievably rich people have access to like incredibly cheap loans and they use that money to buy tesla stock this is a sort of cyclical thing that just continuously increases the value of the company and it's not just sort of like banks and investors

a lot of money that goes into tesla comes in there from state pension funds yep from bunch

bunches of a whole bunch of different countries and also like a huge number of american states

like your teachers pensions are all tied up in this because yeah pension reform the way that we

sort of like lost the pension as a normal thing was that it was you know it was converted to 401ks

and the people who still have like regular state pensions all of that money is now sort of invested in the stock market and it puts billions of dollars in into tesla every year yeah and so this is also another aspect this is this is the broader structural level on which on which u.s macroeconomic policy was designed to create a bunch of companies like tesla and then u.s sort of like micro policy the micro creation of markets through tax credits and you know all of these government contracts they've been given to do like everything from like fucking build these cars to like put spy satellites in orbit right and like the u.s is like contracting out star like now i mean like all of this stuff right is is literally how elon musk was created yeah but there is a third even deeper level in which you know we can look at at how how these cars are actually produced and how these rockets are actually produced and they're produced by just incredible the incredible exploitation of a huge number of workers and i think people tend to think about you know tesla workers in the u.s but there's tesla workers all over the world there's a huge gigafactory in xingjiang you know there's factories all over china and yeah you know these workers everywhere are paid like absolute shit they work in unbelievably dangerous conditions and at the end of the day they get a very small amount of money so that the richest man in the world can get fucking richer every day yeah and that's before we consider like ingredient parts to teslas right like the lithium you know that we we just addressed for instance in our episode on congo like there are parts for your test your tesla that come out of this country where there has been a war for as long as most of us has been alive.

Really very little effort has gone into improving conditions for people there,

certainly for workers there, doing jobs that are essential to our economy.

And to me and my 401k line going up

comes from exploiting workers in Congo to an extent and elsewhere in the world.

Yeah. And this is something our standard of living is based off of.
But at the end of the day, Elon Musk's, all of Elon Musk's profit comes from the fact that the state's monopoly on violence is used to stop all of these people from ever attempting to resist him. It's deployed in order to stop these people from taking back the fucking value that they create.

Now, unfortunately, all of this sort of neoliberal tinkering we've seen for the last 50 years, right, this attempt to sort of like depoliticize everything and have everything run by neoliberal technocrats and sort of have this sort of like non-politics where you're voting for two parties that are like literally even more the same than they are now.

This attempt to do things like solve climate change through these promotion of carbon markets and create this sort of like stable like capitalist hegemony forever has ultimately been self-defeating. It's why all attempts to regulate capital inevitably fail because the functioning of the capitalist system and particularly the function of the way this version of neoliberalism has worked has concentrated like the most wealth ever held by a single human being into the hands of one guy who was a nazi and then these people use their wealth to accumulate political power and seize control of the state dismantling the systems that were meant to regulate them.
And you can't solve this problem with regulation.

Because again, eventually, they will simply accumulate enough power, retake power, and eliminate the regulations. You can't even solve this problem just by killing them.
I see people talk about the killing of billionaires in China as an example of this. And like, A, that's all political factual and fighting stuff.
and B, they'll execute people specifically

to sort of appease the Chinese worker

so that they never have to fucking watch the pla get run out of shanghai again yeah but the thing is even if somehow you use the state to just kill them right it doesn't work because capitalism will just produce more of these people if you actually want to stop this if you want to stop this elon musk from destroying the entire country and quite possibly ending all life on Earth by fucking with America's nuclear weapons until there's simply not enough safety mechanisms to stop someone from accidentally sending one off, you are going to have to destroy them completely. The permanent base of their power, the power of the oligarch, the power of the billionaire, the power of the dictator must be broken.
This tiny group of men cannot, as a class, be allowed to own the stores and factories and fields and hospitals and supply chains to produce everything we need to survive. It must belong to us.
We create their wealth. The only way to save this world is to take it back.
If we want to save democracy, the only way to do it is to extend democracy into the spheres where Elon Musk rules as a tyrant.

Democracy must march into the workplace to slay the beast at its lair before the despotism of the workplace consumes our political democracy and leaves us with despotism there too. They must cease to rule.
They must cease to exist, not as individuals, but as a class. And the only way to do that is by giving control of their power and their property and their wealth to the workers whose subjugation produced all of it in the first place.
That is the tax that we have in front of us. The challenge that we face is that we face effectively the entire might of the American state, which is one of the most powerful apparatuses of repression that has ever been built.
Our advantage is that that apparatus of repression is currently being run by Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who are, and I cannot emphasize this enough, maybe the two figures most emblematic of what the historian Mike Duncan's, after his extensive study of a whole bunch of revolutions on the Revolutions podcast, concluded to be the great idiots of history, who by their sheer and unmatched ability to make the wrong decision at every single moment are what makes revolutions possible. And if these people are not the great idiots of history that allow us to bring them down and stop them from destroying everything that has ever been in this world, that is good, then nothing else is.
Yeah. We have the one great stroke of good fortune we have right is that the all power has been concentrated in the hands of complete idiots who are uh addicted to diet coke and and being mad at their children yep and and they you know we we have already seen they don't they don't understand how this apparatus works right They fired the nuke police by accident.
Yeah. So, like, it's very funny that they're stripping themselves of the means of coercive violence.
Yeah. When we started, you spoke about controlled opposition, right? And the idea that, like, the great debate of our time is how much state regulation we should have and how much unfettered anarcho-capitalism we should have.
They are drinking the Kool-Aid that got them in power. That is the one thing going in our favor right now, that they are dismantling the means of coercive violence because they genuinely believe the myth that if the state didn't exist, they could be even more wealthy and even more tyrannical.
Yeah. And the second advantage that they have been, they have set about systematically alienating every single group of people who they would need as their political base.
They are pissing off the military. They are pissing off the intelligence services they are going through and they are like systematically pissing off the farm states.
And you know, like the farmers obviously do not have that, like don't fucking matter, but they're picking, they're pissing off the agro businesses. They are individually going through and pissing off a whole bunch of the country's scientific resources they're going through, they're fucking with the Social Security Administration, they're individually going through and pissing off every single group of people on Earth who matter and people who, like us, under this system, aren't supposed to matter until we fucking do something about it.
And, you know, the other big thing that we have right now is that he is pissing off massive sections of capital by by actually doing these terrorists which they didn't think he would do and by pulling apart his base of support and by putting together coalitions of some of these people and not all of them some of them some of them you just need to divide and conquer by getting them out from backing him right like the the whole thing thing with the Bolsheviks taking over in the October Revolution

was that people just mostly stayed home, and that was how they won.

Like, that is largely what we need.

We need these people to stay home, but these people can and will,

if we have anything to say about it, be fucking driven home,

and hopefully we can bury both the grave diggers and the people

whose graves they were digging in the same spot in the dustbin of history and never have to deal with these fucking assholes again. We're in Raising Cane's with the man that started it all wait are you the yes chef guy we got chicken fingers crinkle cut fries texas toast and their world famous cane sauce you're trying to tear right now raising canes chicken fingers welcome to it could happen here a show about things falling apart.
I'm Garrison Davis, and I'm joined today by a special guest host, Bridget Todd. Welcome back to the show.
Thank you so much for having me. I am completely excited to be here.
I am a listener of the show, so it feels like getting to be on a show that I actually freak out too often. And I'm very excited for you to be here because you have a special report on one of the people who I've been cyber stalking for years.
And I'm very excited to hear the details of what she's been up to these past few weeks. I kind of know the rough overview because again, because of my cyber stalking.
But I've not done a deep dive the way you have. So I'm very excited to hear an update on this character.
So it sounds like we are in a similar place when it comes to this person. And this person is none other than Candace Owens.
First of all, what are your thoughts on her? Because I am low-key fascinated with her. I follow her on social media.

I watch her videos. I am weirdly captivated by her.
I mean, I've covered her mostly through her involvement with Daily Wire. I've talked a little bit about how that all fell apart a year and a half ago or so.
I've talked a little bit about her involvement in Turning Point USA with Charlie Kirk. and she's just kind of been one of these random

orbiters

of the online right-wing content sphere for, I don't know, the past six years at least. And I typically focus more on the Ben Shapiros, the Matt Walshes, back in the day, the Stephen Crowders and stuff.
But Candace was always just around. And she definitely went after a different demographic than what my usual focus is.
I'm focused on what's going on with straight white men. Why are they like this? And who is targeting them? And that's the Matt Walsh, Steven Crowder kind of angle.
Candace Owens of a broader net that she targets with her content. So like she's always kind of come up as like a side character.
I don't think I've ever done like a distinct focus on her before besides just, you know, whatever kind of crazy post or like, you know, anti-trans or like very like weird, like racist rant that she goes on like every once in a while. Yes.
So there is so much to talk about when it comes to Candace Owens. I'm sort of like you, like I sort of saw her as a side character, but only recently have I realized like, oh, people in my life are listening to Candace Owens and citing Candace Owens and they have no idea any about her, anything about her backstory.
Yeah. All the stuff that you that you were just talking about.
She's like reinvented herself like multiple times. And, you know, some people who mainly come at this from like the anti-fascist research perspective might not be aware of her like latest rebrand, which is what I'm excited to hear about today.
Yes. I just remembered how she had that whole event with Kanye when she did her like BLM documentary.
That was a whole other Candace era. Yeah.
So much. Oh, god.
I have to say, I was like, low-key embarrassed for her. Because like, during her Kanye West era, she was like, Kanye West designed the couture outfits for my Blexit movement.
And Kanye West was like, no, I fucking didn't. And like, I was like, oh, that's so embarrassing that you like, that you like publicly aligned yourself with Kanye West only for him to basically like, diss you publicly right after.
Yeah. And then come out as like an explicit neo-Nazi like two weeks later.
Yes. Yes.
Oh, Candace, girl. So I want to talk about her.
Like, I don't want to spend too much time on her background, but there are some pieces that I think like are good for understanding kind of who she is, this chameleon figure that she's been. Totally.
If there is not like a behind the bastards on her, do you know if there is? There should be if there's not. Not yet.
Similarly on Bastards, she's been one of these like recurring characters. Oh my God.
But she has not had a distinct focus. Robert Evans, get on it because we need the Candace Owens behind the bastards.
So Candace grew up in Stamford, Connecticut. While she was a student there, she went through this horrible sounding racial harassment.
A classmate left her like this racist death threat on her voicemail that turned into like a pretty serious local scandal because it turned out the student who made that threat via voicemail did so in a car with a group of students that

included the son of the then mayor and then future Democratic governor of Connecticut,

Daniel Molloy. So she got tons of support from the local chapter of the NAACP,

and her family ended up suing the Stanford Board of Education in federal court

for failing to protect her rights, resulting in a $37,500 settlement. She went on to study journalism at University of Rhode Island before dropping out.
This is like the early 2000s? Yes. This was like young, like baby Candace, high school Candace before she was the Candace Owen that we know today.
Yeah. So I sort of like almost see a little bit of myself and where she got her start.
Like me, she was an early adopter of using the Internet to talk about things like race and politics. Like me, that also seemed to sort of manifest in a lot of like low hanging fruit shit posts on the early days of blogging.
Like in 2015, she was writing blogs, making fun of Trump's penis size. Sure.

Many such cases.

Yes, many such cases.

So in 2015, Owens is running a blog called Degree 180, where she wrote pieces criticizing conservative Republicans, writing about the, quote, batshit crazy antics of the Republican

Tea Party.

The good news is they will eventually die off peacefully and in their sleep, we hope.

And then we can get right on with the obvious social change that needs to happen immediately

Thank you. The good news is they will eventually die off peacefully and in their sleep, we hope.
And then we can get right on with the obvious social change that needs to happen immediately, she wrote on her blog. So back then, she was really someone who had like a progressive point of view and was doing a lot of public writing about what she was seeing and experiencing in politics at the time.
Yeah, no, this is something that I guess some people might not know if they've only, like, become aware of her through Daily Wire. Yeah, like, in the pre-2016, like, BuzzFeed internet kind of sphere, she was just, like, one of, like, these people who would, yeah, have, like, you know, progressive-ish takes, criticize embarrassing, like, politicians and, like, overtly racist stuff happening.
And then the degree to which this heel

turn happens is one of the

most stark examples I've seen.

I don't know. I'm

trying to think of if there's any exact

parallel. I don't know.
There's certainly some

detransitioned grifters.

There used to be ex-gay

influencers.

It's like proto-influencers

before influencers were a thing.

Ex-gay speakers. But

Thank you. There used to be like ex-gay influencers or, you know, it's like proto-influencers, kind of before influencers were a thing.
Like ex-gay speakers. But yeah, the switch around on Candice from these blog posts is so concentrated.
So in her own words, she describes it as happening overnight. There you go.
Yeah. How it happened is like fascinating to me.
So in 2016, when Gamergate was in full swing, Owens launched a Kickstarter for a project called Social Autopsy, which she described as a way to catalog the abuses of trolls and cyber bullies. Fun fact, that Kickstarter is still up today.
It is such a weird time capsule of a different time. There's like a video of her speaking earnestly about the need to like have the internet be a like safer, more equitable landscape.
It is nuts. Like people should go listen to her speaking about this project.
So the plan for this project was essentially that she would create a way to de-anonymize online commentators and then connect them with like their real names and their real life employers. And what's so funny is that like that is the very same argument that a lot of people use, people who like want to restrict the open internet still use today that like problems on the internet, online harassment and abuse would all be improved if only everybody had to use their government ID and government names to access the internet.
And so like it's very that that idea, it was bad then, and it didn't really die. It was just recycled into today.
Yeah, I mean, there's a version of this that happens, or at least it kind of used to happen more in regards to anti-fascist research, where you identify specific extremely racist accounts or explicit neo-Nazis and contact their employer in an attempt to get them fired so they can focus on getting a new job and supporting themselves rather than doing racism online and in person, especially if he's like, you know, a member of like a group, whether that be, you know, the Proud Boys back in the day or many, many other groups, Patriot Prayer, now Patriot Front, that sort of thing. It's funny how hated this tactic is soon to be by people like Candice and the Daily Wire people, but here she's advocating it herself.
Exactly. And it's like post Anita Sarkeesian kind of content like world.
Yeah. So pretty much everybody thought this was a bad idea, including video game developer Zoe Quinn, who folks might remember was kind of at the center of Gamergate and was like viciously attacked.
Owens was subsequently harassed and doxxed, and she blamed Zoe Quinn and other feminists for this and said so publicly. As you can probably guess, like people like Milo Yiannopoulos loved this.
people who were promoters of Gamergate really hyped up Owens' claims that like, yes, feminists were actually the ones doing all the online harassing. Okay, I can see where this is going.
So this event is what Owens credits with her turn from progressive to, quote, becoming a red-pilled radical. She says, I became a conservative overnight.
I realized that liberals were actually the racists.

Liberals were actually the trolls.

She starts promoting right-wing viewpoints on her YouTube channel,

calling herself, quote, red-pilled black,

which I gotta say is like pretty good branding.

Like, I'm not mad at the branding there.

It's like, okay, black woman talking about like right-wing stuff.

Red-pilled black, I get it, I get it.

Yeah, I'm interested to see how much the checkbook was a consideration here. Oh yes.
How much her Kickstarter got versus how much she realized she could get if she jumped on the other side of the content churn. Well, she almost instantly gets noticed by Charlie Kirk, founder of turning points USA.
Right. And he hires her almost immediately.
She starts cranking out these videos that really perform quite well. Like her videos really go viral.
Videos where she's doing things like dismissing the 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Alex Jones gets her to co-host some of his Infowars shows.
She's doing stints on Fox News as a paid commentator like yeah business is booming for candace owens from from this turn yeah this is this is around when i became aware of her yes in 2021 she joins up with the daily wire there was so much fanfare around them hiring candace like it was a big deal she moved to nashville yeah even a House Joint Resolution, House Joint Resolution 350, a resolution in the Tennessee government to congratulate Candace Owens on relocating to Tennessee and for her work at Daily Wired that reads, whereas Ms. Owens has earned the admiration and respect of millions of Americans through her activism in support of President Trump as a Black woman and her perceptive criticism of creeping socialism and leftist political tyranny.
Very cool stuff. Yeah.
Imagine it being like a joint resolution in your local government when you move someplace. Yeah.
The governor of Tennessee was like super excited when the Daily Wire relocated their headquarters to Tennessee and brought in all these people. There was so many private dinners, meetings.
There was a number of resolutions welcoming The Daily Wire to Tennessee in this 2021 period as they were just starting to launch their own streaming service website, which is why they recruited Candace is because they were looking for content creators to fill out their slate. So you would think that this should be like a match made in heaven, right? Smooth sailing.
They need incendiary content creators. She is an incendiary content creator.
Should be a match made in heaven. Perfect.
Not quite, because things end in like this really messy public fallout just a few years later. So I know that you've done episodes on this.
From my perspective, and I would love to know what you think, it's not 100% clear what went down, but the public friction between Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro, one of the founders of Daily Wire, it seemed to be related to reactions around the situation in Gaza. Yeah, totally.

So Ben Shapiro is Jewish,

and Owens, as we said,

has said and done, like,

a lot of anti-Semitic stuff,

like, a lot.

And, like, actual anti-Semitic stuff.

Like, that people use that

as a way to, like,

shut down, like,

very, very admirable,

like, pro-Palestinian activism.

No, Candace Owens just is anti-Semitic. Same thing with Jackson Hinkle.
She made an escalating series of anti-Semitic claims after October 7th, which slowly broke with the company and been more and more over a series of a few months. Yes.
And it's funny because like it also kind of mirrors this like online fight she had with Steven Crowder like a year or so prior when Daily Wire was trying to recruit him. And then she got informed about like how like abusive he was to his wife.
And then she went on like a media blitz like against him as like as he was in negotiations like with the Daily Wire. She's, like, very willing to, like, stir shit up, like, even if it, like, goes against her own interests or the interests of, like, whatever company she works for.
Like, she is absolutely willing to, like, make, like, some kind of, like, chaotic spectacle regardless of her own, like, you know, financial security, I guess. Yes, like, she, I'm so glad that you mentioned that.
She is not afraid to get down and dirty in public. And I do think like, you know, as a black woman who works with a lot of white men, I would imagine that she's probably thinking like, I have to have some kind of decorum.
I don't want anyone to say that I'm being a crazy black woman or whatever. She, it seems like she has no such qualms.
Like she is like, I will, I will make this a public messy fight and I am not afraid to make a genuine spectacle of myself. Yeah.
And so it is really important to note that like, as you said, she wasn't just like criticizing the Israeli state. She was like getting into like blood libel and like deep conspiracy theories.
Yeah. No, it was, there was some really nasty posts.
Yeah, like one of the things that she said, she's claimed that Judaism was, quote, a pedophile-centric religion that believes in demons and child sacrifice and that she was waking people up to the fact that pedophiles are in power. Like stuff like that.
Not great. Not good.
Not good. So as you said, like, this starts to become like a public feud toward her employer.
She wrote on Twitter, no one can serve two masters and ended her post writing, you cannot serve both God and money. To which Ben Shapiro, her boss tweets.
Like quote tweeted. Oh my God.
Like Candace, if you feel that taking money from the daily wire somehow becomes between you and God, by all means, quit. Like, messy as hell.
It's crazy that instead of having, like, a company meeting, they were just doing this on Twitter.com. Oh, my God.
And my messy ass was eating it up. I was like, keep fighting.
Let them fight. Oh, yeah.
No, absolutely. I'm totally willing to, like, watch this.
Watch this go down. I do not want to get involved.
Right, right, right. Owens went on Tucker Carlson's show and said that Ben Shapiro was, quote, acting unprofessional

and emotionally unhinged for weeks now.

She said that Shapiro, quote, crossed a certain line.

When you come for scripture and read yourself into it, I will not tolerate it.

Very cool.

Yeah.

So at one point, Owens tweets that she wants Ben Shapiro to have a public debate with her, moderated by podcaster Patrick Bet-David. Ben Shapiro was having none of this.
He tweets, Candace, I can see why you'd want to hide behind a moderator, particularly one who said we should rename our company, quote, Daily Jewish Wire, just yesterday. No.
Jesus Christ. One-on-one, Monday at five.
We can sit down and have a healthy debate like adults and we'll live stream it on X and YouTube. Take it or leave it.
As to the true reason why you didn't respond to my offer to sit down with you and discuss these issues publicly or privately back in February, I have no idea what the hell you're talking about. Like, this is lawyer employee going at it on Twitter.
I can't believe I'm taking Ben Shapiro's side here, not just because he's Ben Shapiro, but also because he's an employer. But it's a really tough situation here.
Yeah, I feel the same way because it's just not a great look to have somebody that you just hired to all this fanfare coming at you like this on Twitter. And I think, I mean, this is just my opinion.
So take that for what it's worth. Just as somebody who has worked in media and been around the block, the reason why I'm not comfortable saying like their feud was entirely based on Owens' anti-Semitic comments and behavior is that she just went so hard and so public that something to me, I almost wonder if there was like a contract dispute here that like she was like, oh, I can make more money on my own.
Totally. Got to get out of this contract or something.
Because like it just doesn't smell right. I mean, yeah.
If she had like an inclination that she could afford to lose this job because she might make more money on her own, then yeah, absolutely. That would allow her to push this further than what she might otherwise might.
Like there's been a lot of discussion in the right wing content sphere about like the Daily Wire's fairly restrictive contracts, despite still getting paid tens of millions of dollars. There is restrictions on what happens when you lose monetization, because the Daily Wire is a company trying to make a profit.
So totally, there could absolutely be other financial stuff going on here. I think it's more like an interlocking series of issues rather than just one thing or another.
Yes. So after Rabbi Shmuley Botich criticized Owens for her defenses of Kanye West, Owens liked a tweet asking Botich if he was, quote, drunk on Christian blood again.
Jesus. And I guess that was the final straw.
A few days later, Daily Wire and Candace Owens ended their relationship with Owens tweeting, the rumors are true. I am finally free.
Okay, so that's what happened with her and Daily Wire. So where is she now? Well, this is where the story gets interesting because I had not heard from Candace Owens in a minute and my reintroduction to her happened recently when I was trying to make sense of the dispute between two Hollywood A-listers, Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni.
So the issue between Blake and Justin, it's a little bit complicated and ongoing, but it's actually a pretty interesting story that includes a lot of things that I enjoy,

like how celebrities use media and how social media platforms can be weaponized for or against specific people.

Email correspondence where people make themselves look terrible in writing

because they do not expect those emails to be in a deposition later.

Like, that is my favorite thing in the world.

Like, please continue to put your wrongdoing in writing so that my nosy ass can read it later and be like, ooh, messy. So I do encourage, like, folks to read up on it because it does go beyond just, like, two celebrities having a feud.
But you don't really need to know the specifics for our purposes. The quick and dirty version is that Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni were in a movie adaptation of the very popular novel by Colleen Hoover called It Starts With Us.
In December, Lively filed a legal complaint against Baldoni, accusing him of sexual harassment and starting a smear campaign against her. Baldoni strongly denies that and has sued her in response.
Both camps have released information like emails, text messages, and video attempting to make the other look bad.

So it has kind of turned into one of those inkblot tests that changes depending on whose version you buy. Version one is that Blake Lively was being sexually harassed on set by a fake feminist ally who is actually an abusive man.
or version two that Blake Lively is an egomaniac

who was using her star power and A-list celebrity network

like her husband, Ryan Reynolds, from Deadpool, to control the narrative around her being a nightmare on set and steamrolling everybody on this project. Cool.
Yes. And so what's interesting about this to me is that it's one of those stories where algorithmically, it depends on what silo or what pocket of the internet you're at to determine like what version of this story you're getting like much like johnny depp's defamation lawsuit sounds too much like the johnny depp thing yeah exactly exactly and so like for whatever reason tiktok thinks i hate blake lively and want to pour over every nuance of how she is a fraud, right? Like, but someone else's TikTok might be like, no, Blake Lively, we should be supporting her.
Like, it's one of those situations where just depending on where you are on the internet, you might get a very different impression of the public sentiment leaning one way or another. Yeah, yeah.
This is all the types of things I try to avoid learning about at almost all costs.

So thanks.

Yes, I do not blame you.

Thanks for letting me know.

So I was trying to get to the bottom of it because I kept hearing about it.

Like everyone was talking about it.

So I'm talking to my cousins who I would lovingly describe as normies and that they are not super online.

It's like they're not like you and me.

They're not like deep into the depths of extremism or anything like that.

No, they're not watching like the Daily Wire for fun slash for work. Yes.
Yeah. And my cousins are like, oh, my God, there is this black girl journalist who has been following everything and breaking it down.
She has all the tea. We'll tag you.
That journalist was Candace Owens. Okay.
So, you know,

Candace has been making so many videos

off of this

and like her coverage,

coverage in quotes,

has really taken off online.

As the Cut put it

in a piece called

Candace Owens

Has Gone Mainstream,

they write,

the right-wing commentator's

coverage of the Blake Lively

Justin Boldani case

has reached millions of viewers.

Owens' podcast

was hours and hours of analysis of the case, deep dives into court filings, tabloid news stories, even Ryan Reynolds' recent SNL 50th anniversary special appearance. One listener said, she's really been able to go in and pinpoint discrepancies in some of the things Blake Lively has said, rather than us having to go through it on our own.
Ah, of course. It's the woman who's lying about being sexually harassed, of course.
One listener of her podcast says she recognizes that Owens seems to have a pro-Baldani bias, but she doesn't care because, quote, she's urging us to look past the fact that this is not a feminist issue at all, that it's about getting justice for whoever is being wronged here. She's uniting the left and the right.
The right-wing women's magazine also published a headline about this saying how Candace Owens is uniting conservatives and liberals with her it ends with us coverage. So her coverage of this dispute has really allowed her to attract a lot more viewers beyond her like normal right-wing extremist base, which has generally been like a lot of white men like, that who was really listening to her content before when she was with Daily Wire.
Now, she has really branched out. So, like, normies, like my cousins, who have no idea who Owens is, have no idea her background, her past, the work that she has done, and just think, like, oh, she's a normal entertainment journalist, like, digging and getting the dirt.
I know she's doing this, like, on her podcast, I assume YouTube as well. She also just like trying to like flood TikTok, trying to flood like Instagram reels.
Like is this kind of part of how she's trying to like expand her reach? It is like she's everywhere. And then she has her longer form podcast and YouTube.
But then clips of her like, you know, breaking down the top lies or top inaccuracies and things that Blake Lively has said, those go super viral on social media, the short clips. Yeah.
Okay. And all of this has been just gangbusters for her growth and engagement.
Here's how the cut put it. Since Owen started covering the Lively Baldani case, her YouTube channel has exploded in popularity, allowing her to attract a much larger fan base than the audience of hardcore conservatives she has amassed over the years.
Each episode about Lively racks up at least 1.5 million views. In the past month alone, Owens has amassed more than 450,000 new subscribers on YouTube, and her total video views have quadrupled since this time last year.
This is according to data from the platform Social Blade. Oh, no.
Over the past three months, her audience on YouTube has almost started skewing 65% female, according to data provided by a spokesperson, a marked shift from her past fan base. So, yeah, she's exploding in popularity.
She's everywhere. And now she's attracting, like, normie women who are just coming in for this celebrity dispute.
Yeah, that's probably not going to end well, huh? Well, I don't think it will end well. You know, I was like racking my brain trying to figure out like, why has this story taken off so much for Owens? And there are a couple of reasons I think this is like working for her.
One, I hate to say it, but she is actually genuinely interesting to listen to. You know, when she was a progressive voice online, she definitely was somebody who had a point of view and a clear voice and a perspective.
And that really comes through when she's breaking down Blake Lively in these videos. She has a way of speaking that really makes you pay attention and signals to the listener like this person is really breaking it down.

It's the same reason why on TikTok or social media when someone is like story time or like I'm about to tell you all the details of something.

Those videos always perform very well on social media.

And I think that Owens is just very good at knowing how to hold somebody's attention online.

Like I have to say it.

Sure.

I mean, she's been doing the content churn for almost a decade now. Like, yeah, you do get good at it on like a technical proficiency level.
Yes. Also, you know, we just love good old-fashioned misogyny.
And if that misogyny can be laced with like a conspiracy theory, I think think that it's even better so like i think that part of this is just like social media platforms are always going to amplify misogyny i would argue that things like misogyny transphobia misogynoir racism all of that is like baked into the experience of showing up online as a feature not a bug yeah and i think that owens takes it even further because she is breaking it down. Like she's uncovering some conspiracy.
Like it's not just, let's talk about Blake Lively. It's I'm uncovering the web of lies and I'm going to expose Blake Lively's dark truth.
Right. And so like, of course that's going to take off.
And she does gain this element of authority because she's a woman talking about this. It makes men feel better about being misogynistic because a woman's telling them it's OK to.
I mean, this is this is the same thing that she was able to weaponize for all of her like like anti Black Lives Matter stuff for all of her like racism isn't real things. She tries to use that to her advantage, mostly to make like white members of her audience like feel good about their own racism because a black woman told them it's actually okay.
And like that, that's been like a big part of her career the past few years. Exactly that.
And I think like she really understands that the inviting power of taking what you might think of as like a contrarian stance on something like yeah totally like after the me too movement how many women got engagement by taking a contrarian stance right like i think going against the conventional attitude that says like oh we have to automatically support the woman in this in this dispute probably makes people tuning into owens's breakdowns feel like they're like free thinkers who are going against the grain, you know, by taking an unpopular opinion, which I do think connects to her more odious stances on things like trans people and women and Jewish people. Yeah, no, I mean, like you see the same thing with like, you know, like the gays against groomers thing, right wing trans influencers, de-trans influencers.
It's the same like Gambit. And certainly I think like, yeah, like your identification of her as like a professional contrarian is like very very key to her success exactly I also think like part of the reason why people are attracted to conspiracy theories is that it allows for like fantasy world building and I think that I really see the ways that she injects that into her coverage even the word coverage coverage, I put that in quotes because like she is like a wild person.
So her coverage is like also wild. She does not adhere to, as she puts it, quote, a traditional style of reporting.
You know, I'll take her word for that one. You know what? I'll believe her on that single point.
Yeah, I believe her. I believe that, you know, she amplifies rumors.
And even once she read a letter that she said that she got from Blake Lively's husband, Ryan Reynolds, his acting coach when he was 12. And according to Candace Owens, his acting coach said that Ryan Reynolds was an obnoxious kid.
You know what? I also believe it. Oh, I have no trouble believing that.
But like her it includes like side characters yeah things that have no bearing on this whatsoever i mean like this this focus on like this like conspiratorial ben is like the same it she's using the same tactics she did for her black lives matter documentary for like most of her political work like it it's she's using the same tactics over and over again and eventually she like reaches this like stress point or this like threshold where she cannot see a path forward or she can't see a way to surpass it and then she does a pivot this happened with her progressive blog this happened even at the daily wire she does not she doesn't work with turning point usa anymore and like this this new pivot is learning hey it's super lucrative to be like a tabloid entertainment, quote unquote, journalist. Very easy, super lucrative.
And all of the tactics you learned on the right wing media sphere work great here. Like all of this, like conspiratorial thinking, really a disregard for like like facts and evidence works perfect for this sort of like rumor based reporting.
And it spreads like crazy and yeah it spreads across

political lines you don't you aren't just targeting the mega people or like the far right this this

can be so much more broad to like the giant audience of like you know quote-unquote like

apolitical people go to these platforms for a form of like of like escapism and entertainment

rather than you just hearing about politics yet again because that's you know very very tiring

Yeah, and I think in my mind, all of it is sort of connected. Like, Ben Shapiro, nobody cared more about celebrities or talked more about celebrities than Ben Shapiro.
He would love to be like, I don't care what Hollywood is doing, but he was obsessed with, like, Beyonce Thee Stallion. Like it was just like a negative obsession.
Like, you know, anti-fandom is still fandom. When you make video after video about how much you don't like Meg Thee Stallion, in a kind of way, you are a fan just in the opposite direction.
And so I think that Candace Owens really took that and learned how to perfect it. Because she is much, I think that she is much better at this than Ben Shapiro is.
Like the evidence being that like her YouTube channel is exploding with people who probably would never watch any of Ben Shapiro's content. The big bummer for me is that The Daily Wire's first film, Lady Ballers, left us on a cliffhanger with Candace Owens and Matt Walsh sitting in a car talking about how Matt Walsh planned this entire like plot of of the film as like as like some kind of scheme or like social experiment and you know it was implied there would be more you know it was like a you know like Avengers Nick Fury type post-credits scene and and now we're never gonna learn what Candace Owens and Matt Walsh get up to now she's left the company.
She's now doing her own thing. So now we just have this dangling plot thread that's just going to bug me forever.
What does the Candace Owens character at the end of Lady Ballers do next? I'm going to be thinking about this for years. America deserves closure.
We deserve to know. Just putting that out there.
I think we do deserve closure. I just think my closure is going to be a little bit different.
I'm very fine having all of these plot threads wrapped up quite quickly, but I do not see that in the cards immediately. So in terms of where she's at now like you know my question is like has owens has this kind of like mainstream audience that she's been able to amass has she changed her views is she is she trying to do a rebrand or a pivot in an interview she said in terms of my perspective i haven't changed anything i been anti-Me Too since long before it was cool.
Sure. I mean, that can be true.
It's also true that she's getting better at propaganda and widening her footprint, which yeah, then once her audience gets bigger, she might be able to slip in more things that I would find unsavory to a larger audience over time. But she also might be content to keep growing that and be slightly less off-putting in the meantime.
But no, there's also just a huge audience for the anti-woke backlash, anti-MeToo stuff right now. That's kind of like the new mainstream, frankly.
So I am certain that she's going to try to continue to flex that and grow that in the next few months, years. Yeah, so I agree with you.
I believe Owens when she says that, like, her stances have not changed much. Yeah, no.
It's easy to be like, oh, well, she's pivoting to go mainstream now that she has these, like, women in her audience who are interested in celebrity. And you can honestly, you can sort of see some of this in changes to her physical appearance.
Like, she was sort of known for having very severe hair. The joke being that she had alienated herself so much from her fellow black people that like no black person was going to do her hair.
And that's why it looks that way. But lately, you've really seen this like softening.
She's kind of going for like a softer public look. She is pivoting to different kinds of programming.
She's branched out into doing a book club for paying subscribers and some kind of a fitness program. That makes sense.
Yeah, totally. Like the health guru fitness entertainment bubble.
Yeah, that's huge. That's such a good grift.
She's going to make so much money. Yeah.
Yeah, she is. But I really agree with you, Gare, that like, I think that these new followers are certainly going to be walked down a pipeline that includes her extremist attitude, just using celebrity scandal as a hook.
Because, like, as you said, celebrity scandals and celebrity stories are just considered fluff for a lot of people.

So, like, people who care about extremist content and ideology are maybe not seeing that as a space that they need to pay too close of attention to about these stories that you might see on the cover of an Us Weekly. But these stories actually can be used to tap into extremist ideologies and unleash them in a whole new audience.
And like you were saying, if you are just like watching a podcast because you want to be entertained about a story about two celebrities, you might not have your bullshit detector up to be like, wait, is this extremist content? Because it's seen and treated as a less charged space. And so that line of thinking that says that this is just fluff, it doesn't really matter what happens in celebrity news, it's not just incorrect.
It is dangerous because it lends itself to people being more susceptible to it when extremist content is slipped in without even really realizing it. I mean, that relates even to the originator of this Gamergate stuff and the whole anti-woke media fandom content sphere, right? Where so much of the anti-woke backlash has been built on people complaining that Star Wars is too woke now.
There's too many women in movies. There's too many black people in commercials.
Where did all the white people go? There's too many gay people in TV. There's too many trans people in TV.
That is definitely focused on by the rest of the Daily Wire goons. You can very easily pivot back to that sort of cultural commentary after you're done talking about Blake Lively.
This is a very small jump where you're still talking about the entertainment industry, but with this anti-woke framing of why is all these minorities here? Why are they pushing transgenderism on kids? Whether that be talking about trans actors in the business, whether you be talking talking about, you know, like female led or like diversity casting, like all that kind of stuff that especially Candace can use her like contrarian position to speak on authority about, talking about why are you recasting these legacy characters to be people of color? Or why is a woman the lead of this thing when it should be actually a man? You know, just like very, very part of the YouTube slop for a decade now. But it still takes in a lot of clicks.
And it is a lot of what the Daily Wire and right-wing content still does. It's all this weird culture war stuff.
It's very tied in with Hollywood. Like you were saying about how like Ben Shapiro claims, you know, like hate Hollywood.
He's trying to build his own alternative to it, but he can't stop talking about it. Like he can't stop complaining about Disney's snow white.
And I can see Candace doing like the exact same thing, but now with like an, honestly like a bigger, a bigger, more like a political audience that's much more malleable and can be shaped around these larger cultural trends

when you think about this

perception of this backlash

against wokeness.

I absolutely think

that's what we're going to see.

And I can tell you,

we can finish by,

I can tell you about

her next big pet issue,

which is going to be

championing Harvey Weinstein,

who she has been-

No, no, no.

No. She's been interviewing him since 2022.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, she explains while he is, quote, an immoral man, he is also a victim of the justice system. A victim, sure.
A victim. And she says, I've always had faith in our court system and now it's beginning to change.
Now I'm beginning to wonder if our courtrooms have been politicized. And the thing that's made her think this is Harvey Weinstein.
It's wild. I mean, like Ben Shapiro is starting his own campaign to free Derek Chauvin.
I think there's gonna be a lot of pressure on the courts right now. I mean, you're seeing that from like Elon and Trump as well.
I think undermining the authority of the court, I think is actually kind of part of this larger concerted issue amongst the entirety of the right right now, because this is like their biggest remaining roadblock to achieving their right wing utopia is the court system. And I, you know, this may not be intentional on every person's part, like Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens aren't, aren't like intentionally collaborating on this, but they may be copying each other's trends.
and if they're seeing this wider push across a large amount of like the right wing content people to put pressure on various aspects of the courts, including by using like high profile cases like Harvey Weinstein or Derek Chauvin, that's not a great sign. And I can definitely see them trying to do that in conjunction, I guess.
Yeah, I think we're going to see a lot more of it. Candice has a series coming out called Harvey Speaks that apparently tells his side of the story.
So look out for that. And I think that's the thing.
Like, I think with her content, like when asked why it was she thought that her Blake Lively stuff was really taking off, she says that she believes her new fans on the left, quote, have just kind of gotten wise to the fact that maybe women lie just like men. And so I just implore folks that like, even if you think that you're just like retaking in this content because you're following fluffy celebrity news or whatever, it is so easy to go from maybe women lie to maybe women can't be trusted or maybe women shouldn't work and have jobs.
A stance that Candace herself has actually advocated for, despite very obviously being a working woman. And so I don't think we should trust Candace Owens, even if she does this rebrand.
Like, don't let her rebrand herself as like just a celebrity investigative journalist. Like, she put all of these odious views out into the world.
and I don't want her to be able to soften it or soften what it is that she advocates for and what it is that she believes in if that is truly what she's trying to do to just sort of amass a more mainstream audience. So don't fall for it.
If you're getting tagged in Candace Owens' videos, just know what she actually is about. I mean, yeah, I think for our audience, it's more likely that you'll have like family members who are going to be finding this stuff.
And you should find a list of sources, maybe this episode included, but probably, you know, you can find some articles as well. Think of some background on Candace's history and previous beliefs.
You can pick and choose some of her most outrageous claims. So when your aunt sends you a video about how Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively are kidnapping children or something, you can maybe inform Aunt Judy that maybe you shouldn't listen to everything this Candace Owens character is saying.
Yeah, this Candace Owens might not be on the money, might not be on the level. No.
Yeah, inform an auntie today. Yes, that's right.
And that's all I got. That's it.
I don't know how you usually end these episodes. Usually by getting sad, but I don't know.
This has been an interesting dive into the life of a woman with many careers. A chameleon.
Many personalities. A chameleon.
A chameleon of contrarianism. Ooh, I like that.
If I ever write a book about her, that'll be the title. Jesus Christ.
Oh, what a nightmare that would be. Man.
Scary. Bridget, where can people find you online? You can find me on my podcast.
There are no girls on the internet on this network I heart radio I mean you can find me on Instagram at Bridget Marie in DC or on blue sky at Bridget Todd well thank you so much good luck in DC thanks for holding holding the line out there as as Elon puts a killdozer through your entire city. We're doing our best.

I would love to talk again

about a DC update

maybe next time you come on the show.

Oh my God.

Yes, please.

There we go.

Well, we will talk then.

Goodbye, everybody. This is It Could Happen Here.
I'm Garrison Davis, still banned from one of the top 15 highest endowment universities in the country. But I am not banned from this podcast.
Today, I'm joined by Robert Evans and James Stout to discuss the very troubling news of students having their visas and or green cards revoked by U.S. customs in relation to anti-genocide protests.
James, this is something that you've been putting together a piece on for a while. Yeah.
Repeatedly trying to warn people of Cassandra-like to no avail. Yes.
Yes. I do feel like we kind of saw this one coming a little bit, but that doesn't mean it's not bad.
And specifically, the case we're talking about today, I think, is particularly egregious because it doesn't actually involve someone's student visa, right? So I've been working for a while on people who actually under the Biden administration were potentially facing deportation, right? But the material difference between that and now is that those people were facing deportation because the university removed their visas or the university removed them from the university and therefore their visa was no longer valid. In this case, it seems that the order came directly from the State Department to deport a guy whose name is Mahmoud Khalil.

So Khalil was a prominent activist in the encampment at Columbia, right?

But what's notable is that, and the events here, as best we can tell, went down like this.

I'm referencing an AP article here that we'll link in the show notes.

ICE agents came to his front door which is on university property and told him that they were revoking his student visa and therefore he was being deported he then informed them that he didn't have a student visa that he was a legal permanent resident right colloquially referred to as a green card holder they then told him or his lawyer at some point, he got his lawyer on the phone and was communicating with them through his lawyer. They then told the lawyer that they were revoking the green card.
And at some point, it's reported that they attempted to detain his wife, who is a US citizen, which, of course, is not a thing that ICE can do. So the difference between a legal permanent resident and a student visa is like the place I want to start this because they are materially very different, right? Student visas are pretty fragile.
People lose their student visas for lots of things all the time. A green card is a much higher barrier.
And the revocation of his green card, we spoke a lot before this episode about like exactly kind of where this comes from in Trump's mishmash of executive orders and speeches right because after he was detained we saw Trump truthing about specifically using the word green card we also saw Marco Rubio tweeting about removing green cards, right? Rubio being the Secretary of State. Normally, the green card wouldn't be a State Department thing.
No. It seems the most likely cause of events, as far as we can tell from what we know right now, and today is the 10th of March, is that ICE came thinking he had a student visa.
It's not particularly uncommon for ICE raids to not have all the information on someone, from what I understand. I mean, this is just a police thing.
Yes, yes. It's not just that.
Cops who are doing raids very often don't have all or accurate information. Yeah.
ICE in particular very often don't have a judicial warrant. They have a warrant that they may sign themselves, which is a different thing.
They're supposed to require a warrant to get onto Columbia University campus. But as of now, I don't believe Columbia have clarified that they did have.
And I think the apology also allows them to allow ICE onto campus in exigent circumstances. So we'll have to see what exactly that warrant was for and why exactly Columbia allowed them onto campus.
So it seems like they came, attempted to evoke this guy's student visa visa realized he didn't have a student visa detained him anyway and then kind of ex post facto the uh these tweets and statements came out but garrison you found some stuff in i mean trump has made previous statements that are kind of unclear right he uses the word aliens a lot yeah so we've been trying to kind of figure out the exact details of what is going on,

what justification they have for doing this,

and how we can extrapolate this out to larger trends.

Because deporting legal residents for college protests is pretty insane.

And also the rhetoric coming out of the White House and the White House social media accounts around this incident is extremely worrying.

like the way they're basically putting up like

Thank you. And also the rhetoric coming out of the White House and the White House social media accounts around this incident is extremely worrying.
The way they're basically putting up wanted posters for protesters and, in general, the way that the White House account has been doing this own-the-libs memetic nationalism the past few weeks has been really upsetting. And this has continued around this issue.
And I think it is worth focusing on this as a specific escalation, because you had people like Mamadou Tal, who I think Cornell tried to revoke their student visa, and then he in some way negotiated back into that to stay on the interim provost. John Siciliano eventually ruled ruled in tall's favor so he did not end up getting deported last year and now this new development uh in relation to the columbia protests is a significant escalation yeah because not only is this not just like the university revoking in f1 which they do have the you know authority to this is like coming coming directly from the Trump administration, where they are going after specific students without the involvement of the university, and students who may be legal permanent residents.
Yeah. Garrison found a fact sheet on Whitehouse.gov where Trump is quoted as saying, quote, to all resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice.
Come 2025, we will find you and we will deport you. And that would seem to include the legal permanent residents.
Yes, right. Like resident alien is a tax status.
But again, like, I think it's quite possible that the vagueness in the language is deliberate, not necessarily from Trump, but there are other people within the Trump cabinet who might seek to to use that vagueness for things like this right like who might see that as a benefit yeah well and you see that with other things like with like with rubio's state department directives on trans people right now where they keep the language intentionally vague they they leave the enforcement up to like individual actors and then they can eventually like figure out the logistics like in court once people be like oh no this is illegal yeah so like yeah it is vague because they want to test the actual like full authority of their power but I think the specific like fact sheet which is like a sister article towards this executive order says like James was saying to all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice. Come 2025, we will find you and we will deport you.
I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before. Unquote.
So there you have him saying both resident aliens, which we can infer probably refers to green card holders, as well as student visas. These are two separate things that he has specifically named as going after.
And now you see more direction from Rubio after this arrest that happened on Monday. You see more direction from Rubio and the State Department in specifically naming legal permanent residents as targets for removal and targets for ice actions which is you know not something that is extremely common yeah like where i've seen it before is like in in cases of of material support for terrorism which but that has quite a high bar of proof right that that's like a listed organization approving a material i.e financial or physical support right like in-kind donations like i i've written about a guy who was providing material aid to the islamic state called sikhiromizhodzik sending stuff from bass pro actually like thermal scopes and hunting scopes and and things like that but that has a much higher bar than this which we will see you know because we have a legal permanent resident here and they're seeking to revoke that, I imagine we will see a court case and we will see exactly the justification for revoking his green card in that court case.

That will be sometime in the future.

Let's go on a quick break and we will come back to discuss some more of the details on what Mark Rubio is actually saying and where this could all end up. Okay, we are back.
I would like to talk about specifically some of the rhetoric that Rubio has been using since this arrest and a little bit of what he was saying before. Like we were saying before the break, some of this kind of vague language can kind of be used to their advantage.
And this is certainly like riffing off of very vague language that Trump would use on the campaign trail, right? Where he would talk about wanting to jail or deport protesters, like in general, regardless if they're student visa holders, green card holders, or just U.S. citizens, right?

Like, Trump has made statements about wanting to do all of that. And campaigns, like, off-the-cuff statements and actual, like, government policy are two different things.
And right now, like, they're trying to figure out where the line between that is, like, how much of this rhetoric can be turned into government policy. and we mentioned like the fact sheet from that from the executive order

that i believe was uh signed in January, which is to quote-unquote combat anti-Semitism. And then last week, so before this arrest happened, we had a post from the Secretary Mark Rubio Twitter account, official, quote, Those who support designated terrorist organizations, including Hamas, threaten our national security.
The United States has zero tolerance for foreign visitors who support terrorists. Violators of U.S.
law, including international students, face visa denial or revocation and deportation, unquote. So that one specifically focuses, I would say, pretty firmly on people who have student visas, right? He names like visitors.
And then after the arrest happened, he posted a different statement on his own personal account, quote, we will be revoking the visas and or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so that they can be deported, unquote, sharing an AP article. And then the Homeland Security DHS Gov account posted, on March 9, 2025, in support of President Trump's executive orders prohibiting antisemitism, and in coordination with the Department of State, U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student. Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.
ICE and the Department of State are committed to enforcing President Trump's executive orders and protecting U.S. national security, unquote.
And there's now been a flurry of posts from both the White House account and DHS accounts, basically posting like a picture of this person saying that he's aligned with Hamas in celebration, almost styled after a wanted poster, but instead it just reads arrested. That's the rhetoric that they're using right now on their official accounts.
Something that James, I think, noted, it's important to think about if ICE was just freestyling this action or if there was a directive beforehand to go after green cards specifically. Right.
And it seems like at least for the people like doing the raid, they did not care, uh, nor, nor did they like, no, they weren't like informed. They just were told to go after this person from someone higher up.
Right. And, and that, that very well could be Rubio.
I mean, a lot of DHS is being ran by Stephen Miller right now. A lot of this feels very Miller-esque.
Yeah. We've got an update.
As of the time of recording, I've just discovered that Mahmoud Khalil's lawyers filed a lawsuit challenging his detention, and a judge in New York City, a federal judge, obviously, ordered that Khalil shouldn't be deported while that court then considered his case. Yes, I was going to bring that up.
So that also, like, his case will be considered in New York City, which is probably good for him as opposed to a more conservative jurisdiction elsewhere, right? Totally. Like, this happening in Texas, like in all of those districts where Elon Musk is trying to set up his corporations because there's friendly judges, this would be handled quite differently, right? Yeah, this is something migrants I speak to are at least aware of sometimes that they don't want to enter into Texas because the Fifth Circuit is seen as less favorable to them than, say, the Ninth Circuit, where they would be if they entered in California.
I'm sort of surprised if it is a Miller joint, that it isn't someone like UT Austin or somewhere like that. No, they're going directly after this individual in part because he's somebody that a lot of folks who might otherwise be like up in arms about a move like this would say because of some of his connections and some of the things he said in the past.
Well, he's, you know, supported groups that are really bad. Like, I think they're really trying to find the first case is they want someone that they can calve a lot of like liberals off from being too scared to support because he said some things that like, they don't want to have attached to them.
Like that's, that's how they're, and they're going to keep pushing that further and further each time you find some folks who you can scare off a lot of maybe what you might call their otherwise natural support base,

because you can point out this thing or that thing they did

that was not great.

Yeah, ACLU types.

I'm not insulting or trying to say bad things about this guy.

I'm just saying that's the tactic here, right?

Just to try to paint this guy as like,

well, this guy did this bad.

Do you really want to support that?

Which is why you have to take an incredibly firm stance

that no, the government doesn't get to do this. The State Department doesn't get to do this.
Yeah, regardless of any things that this person may have said. Yeah, the First Amendment is for everyone.
I don't care what he said, you know? So like, it's also worth noting that Columbia, specifically, The Intercept has reported on this, that there is a WhatsApp group called Columbia Alumni for Israel. And they have been explicitly trying to identify the students and to call for like prosecution and I guess persecution of these students.
And I think the Columbia encampment was particularly objectionable to a lot of people. That was kind of the one that got a lot of the national focus in the reporting, right? So it's understandable that that's where they went for this yeah it's it's high visibility and i think it's also very likely that they are just looking to have a test case for this to see if they can create legal precedent for removing people's green cards for you know anti-genocide protests right and the specific details of that will become more and more or less important based on the results of the case as long as they can create that precedent, right? And specifically, the precedent for revoking a green card, something that's pretty substantial.
They want something that's, in their mind, the most favorable towards their outcome. So that's part of what they're trying to do with this specific case.
like it is it is very much in line with with trump's campaign rhetoric and and versions of what trump has said before and and now you're seeing someone like rubio uh someone who's you know a little bit more policy-minded taking taking steps towards this outcome yeah which i think is you know like the other thing they didn't get to do i guess is that they weren't able to like deport the guy at hyper speed which they have been doing with some people yeah he was detained in new york and then moved to louisiana and people were very upset about this rightly yeah because it's removing him from easy access to his lawyer and to his family and to his eight-month pregnant wife right that's all things that shouldn't be done yeah it's also something that the biden administration did routinely We have other episodes on this, actually, especially in San Diego, where we have some funding that allows people who are detained access to legal assistance. It has been very common for those migrants to be then moved to Texas.
I've seen it with migrants I've met at the border, and I've looked for them in the ICE immigrant detention locator, and they've been moved to Texas. It's not uncommon at all.

So it's bad that it happened.

It was bad that it happened under Biden.

It's still bad that it's happening now.

We shouldn't have let it happen then.

We shouldn't support it when it happens now.

And I think before we go on break again,

I do want to kind of close this section by talking about

how they don't necessarily need an executive order

specifically allowing Trump to do this. Or Trump doesn't need to make an executive order explicitly for this based on immigration deportation law.
There will be an argument made in court that they have justification for this action already. This is something that I've already been through when I immigrated to the country and did my citizenship interview.
If you have discussed in the past something that can be construed as support for a terrorist organization, that does disqualify you from U.S. citizenship.
There's going to be a lot of arguments around specifically these terrorism statutes that will make someone like this a subject for removal. And that that's that's going to be like the angle in which they they go about this and i think that's like worth keeping in mind i also think it's worth because i and i don't want to make this because a lot of people online have this shouldn't be our immediate primary concern our immediately primary concern should be mahmoud and the other people like him who are in situations like absolutely be targeted yeah but i don't think it't think it's unreasonable to say that, like, if they get away with this, at some point they will start saying, like, look, if you support groups that the government describes, like, or any support for any group that the government considers a terrorist, it doesn't matter if you were born here as a citizen, you know, we can start.
Like that is a potential in-state of this, which is, again, should not be on your front burner.

It should be the people being targeted right now, but also an awareness of, like, this is part of why you have to draw such a hard line. Like, if the situation was reversed, and this were a Democratic administration coming after an anti-vaccine student activist who is a permanent legal resident, it would be wrong for them to disappear, right Like that has to be like where the line is drawn

Yeah, the state should not have this

like ability, like we should not let them

get away with this and we should put

as much support and legal support

into preventing this from happening

I really can't say which way this

will go, like

immigration law is one of the most like headache

inducing things I've ever had to go through

in my entire life.

He will be spending

a lot of money on immigration lawyers now.

Also, to be really clear, I'm not

equating support for Palestine to being anti-vax.

I'm just saying, if this was a

shitty guy, it would still be wrong.

If it was something that we like to laugh

at for

getting measles in Texas.

Disappearing people bad. If he russia was doing anti-fascism

in ukraine it would still be important right right you know to to do this and and should we take a break and come back and discuss some more yes yes I wanted to give a little bit of background here, some of the stuff that I've been looking into. So on the 5th of February, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a series of memos.
One of these was establishing a, quote, October 7th task force. I'm going to quote from it here.
To prioritize seeking justice for victims of October 7th, 2023 terrorist attack in Israel, addressing the ongoing threat posed by Hamas and its affiliates and combating anti-Semitic acts of terrorism and civil rights violations in the homeland. It then lifts several action items for the FBI, right? Among them is investigating and prosecuting acts of terrorism, anti-Semitic civil rights violations, and other federal crimes committed by Hamas supporters in the United States, including on college campuses.
The final point is, quote, supporting efforts by the Israeli government, Department of Defense and Department of Treasury to pursue non-criminal responses to the October 7th attack and other terrorist activities by Hamas. There's a couple of things that are concerned.

Obviously, the non-criminal responses could include deportation, right?

Like if the person is not being accused of a crime

and unless having their visa revoked.

Also, the idea of cooperating with a foreign government,

a government which is currently committing a genocide,

potentially against US citizens or US residents,

is quite concerning. It's especially concerning when we talk about that Trump executive order that we've already discussed, right? One of the parts of that Trump executive order that I noticed that I haven't seen any reporting on was the, quote, inventory and analysis of all the Title VI complaints and is part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, right? It prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin D-E-R.
Yes. It applies to federally funded programmes, activities or institutions which receive federal funding, which will cover almost every institution of education in this country, apart from some religious private schools, I guess.
Maybe they still get some federal funding. There have been a number of Title VI cases filed for anti-Semitic discrimination and anti-Palestinian or anti-Arab or Islamophobic discrimination since October 7th, 2023.
The ones filed for Islamophobic discrimination don't seem to be covered by this, but the other ones do. The Biden administration kind of rushed to finish up and resolve some of these in the last few weeks of his tenure.
And normally the were pretty ineffectual it was like some more training to review of policies anyone who's who's been an educator at one of these institutions will have already been very familiar with the sort of anti-discrimination training video that you have to watch and they were suggesting that you watch more of those videos i'm not really convinced that that is the way we deal with hatred but that's what they recommended the emery one i thought was interesting because they told emery that it had to commit to a quote equitable handling of protest after its campus police were so violent towards anti-genocide protesters a lot of the other cases are still pending but it seems like the trump administration is going to go back and review all of them anyway it does seem like whether it's spread organically or whether it's some kind of campaign to file title six complaints a lot of title six complaints were filed after october 7th like and during this time when we saw like campus protests and we saw support by some faculty for those campus protests right and we saw some faculty who may or may not have supported the protest but felt very strongly about the right of students to have freedom of speech on campus. And I'm sure they will have been kind of wrapped up in this big dragnet too.
So this potentially raises the specter of like at least career-threatening. And again, lots of faculty are not U.S.
citizens, right? They might be permanent residents. They might be married to citizens.

They might be here on a visa.

There are a number of different immigration statuses that they could have that are not US citizen

that they could potentially lose.

So what is Trump trying to do about these cases

which could be pending or have already been resolved?

Yeah, well, what they said is they want to

familiarize institutions with the grounds for inadmissibility. So that's not allowing someone to enter the united states right under and read out the section of the united states code but a section of the united states code quote so that such institutions may monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff relevant to those grounds and for ensuring that such reports about aliens lead as appropriate and consistent with applicable law to investigations and comma if warranted comma actions to remove such aliens so it's in there right like this is in trump's late january executive order yeah this is the legal argument that they're making there and and they're asking universities to do some of that legwork for them it seems i imagine that this is the same section of the united states code that we'll see used with reference to khalil but it refers to like excludable or inadmissible aliens which is people coming into the country but i guess they could make an argument that like he disguised his inadmissible status or became inadmissible.

Sure. I mean, there's these two sections, right?

There's this one that revolves around who can be admitted, who can be accepted.

There's that one section, which is section 1227 subsection A4A-C,

which is the section specifically on deportation as relating to supporting, quote-unquote, terrorist activities. So I think they will try to use these both in conjunction.
And I think it's also important to note out here the use of the word aliens as opposed to the word that Rubio was using previously, which is visitors, right? Visitors, I would say, probably applies more to student visa holders. Yeah, non-residents.
Versus aliens. Aliens can be anyone, right? Like aliens can be visa holders, can be green card holders.
Right. And so at least in like the official wording here, the use of the word, I think aliens is important as opposed to like Rubio's like, you know, posts on the X.com, which now become official policy because we're in the hell world yep yeah that refers to like just like you know visitors to this country yeah the right has used aliens for a long time right because it differentiates them from people yeah it's like it's very basic like dehumanization language yeah right in this case it's i think it's important it's pivotal so like we have a sense of what will happen there and maybe i could just finish up by saying if you are faculty or a student if you're encountering this you can reach out to us using our encrypted email so if you'd like to reach out to us it is coolzontips at proton.me it's only encrypted if it's encrypted from the sender as well as a recipient so that would using a Proton or other encrypted email to reach out rather than using an unencrypted email.
If you'd like to reach out, again, coolzontips at proton.me. Obviously, this is something we're going to continue taking an interest in.
And obviously, it's something that we can't report the entirety of now because we're still waiting on the court case. But we are very interested in learning more about it so uh please feel free to reach out yeah absolutely yeah well and it's something that trump is also saying yeah they will be taking a continued interest in uh he is he is promising that this is the first arrest of quote-unquote many to come so yeah as they continue to focus on this we will as well james did you have anything else you wanted to say like re-lawyers uh yes so as i mentioned before right people people under the biden administration have been moved away from their lawyers this is very common it seems that now people are being moved away from their lawyers and having teleconference requests denied i.e let's say garrison you're a lawyer and you have a client detained to San Diego, then moved to Texas, and now you can't teleconference in for a 10-minute hearing.
So you would have to fly, right, for that 10-minute hearing. Hopefully.
Yeah, which is going to make it impossible, both in time terms and financial terms. From what I'm understanding, I'm still digging into this a little bit more, but that's what I'm hearing.
So this is going to be an ongoing thing. I guess if you're an immigration lawyer and one of the places people are being sent to like texas you can help but you probably already know that and you're probably already doing that and you're probably already very very overworked if you work asylum cases so yeah i think now is the time for groups like the aclu to step up or shut up and and we'll see when the aclu has come out against mahmoud's arrest Okay, good.
The ADL, obviously, totally for it. Shocked.
The ADL, an organization formed to help avoid another Holocaust, does not see any potential danger in a state redefining citizenship in order to disappear its political enemy. So we love the ADL here, folks.
But the ACLU did, I mean, we'll see if they do anything, but they did, like, make a statement. Yeah, and they've been very good.
I should say the ACLU has been pursuing a lot of litigation against Trump administration. This is the sort of thing they're pretty consistently anti, yes.
Yeah, especially at a national level. They've been very good at this, and so, yeah, you know, shout out to them, I guess.
I don't know. We don't need to shout it out.
It's their job. Yeah, they get millions of dollars.
Yes, like this is literally why you're there. Do a good job or else.
You'd better do something else too. Like...
Yeah, yeah. You'd better show up.
Yeah, I don't know. Don't donate to the ADL, I guess, if you were thinking of doing that.
Maining our podcast. It could.
It is. It's happened.
It did. Robert, shouldn't you rename the podcast It Is Happening Here? Yeah, uh-huh.
That's a fun joke that I only hear 47 times a day. And the whole point of the podcast was, well, initially, I was a crazy person saying a bunch of stuff would happen.
And now it's a bunch of that stuff happened. And even more of it looks very likely.
And so now I just feel bad all the time. It's going to be cold.
I fucking called it. I fucking told you, bro.
I said this was going to happen. Why don't you rename the podcast? I just feel bad all bad all the time yeah why don't you rename the podcast robert should have bought more stock and ammunition companies than he did and dgi jesus should i have bought stock and dgi yeah i think uh i'm gonna buy a little dgi drone here soon yeah there we go a lot of people are going to be buying little dgi drones here very soon james i should point out that i'm buying one that's not capable of carrying a payload it's definitely a safer investment to pull out your 401k now when the market's crashing use that money buy drones those drones will be worth a lot more in five years or what is what is that? That is the sound of a sound investment.
A box of bullets. It's like how boomers used to invest in silver or gold as a stable currency.
No, we're investing in DGI. Like physical DGI drones.
We are investing in drones and boxes of gunpowder yeah you got to get it in a bottle

rub it in a box it can get light struck or uh get moist you want to get it in a special black black bottle james i keep all of my gunpowder in uh you know how like people used to take cocaine by wrapping it in toilet paper and swallowing it no sure okay well if you say so. Speaking of toilet paper, Nate Silver has a newsletter.
And it would be useful as toilet paper, more so than it is as a newsletter. Sorry, I just got like PTSD flashbacks from 2024 when you said that.
It's okay. Normally, my rule of thumb is every election, usually starting in like December, the year before election year, I begrudgingly fight down a series of panic attacks, vomit three or four times in a bucket, and then head over to Nate Silver's blog to see what he's saying about the polls.
And I do this. I hate that I keep having, I have regularly on election years, people were like, but he was always wrong.
He's like, no, he's, he's reasonably good on polls. He's usually, if you read what he's saying about presidential polls, the reality bears out pretty close to that.
So I read him during elections and I hate it because he's never been right about anything else, but he's, he's a gambler. He's a very, he's a degenerate, filthy gambler.
And so when we're talking about degenerate, filthy gambler stuff, and by God, election polls are the most degenerate type of gambling that exists, he's worth reading. And then after the election, no matter how well or badly it goes, I ignore him again for four years.
And I didn't get to do that this year because on February 25th, 2025, Nate wrote a column called Elon Musk and spiky intelligence. Spiky intelligence.
Am I hearing that right? Spiky intelligence. Yes.
And it very helpfully starts with a drawing that I'm sure he used some AI bit like he must have used some AI like video software to do that just like shows you kind of spiky star-looking thing and then a blob with rounded edges. I can't begin to imagine why Nate Silver thought that we needed this illustrated.
I have to see this. Yeah, yeah.
I would like it to be shared. Look at this.
Why did you... Oh, wow.
The promise of AI. We couldn't have envisioned a spiky thing.
Wow, yeah. It looks like maybe an amoeba.
He looks like an amoeba and then like a poorly drawn star. It's Boba and Kiki.
This is an actual thing. Wait, this is a thing? This is Boba and Kiki with a weird like digital fuzz over it.
Who the fuck are Boba and Kiki? Yeah,ison yeah it's a it's like a social experiment to like ask people what like the emotional correspondence of each of these shapes are like which like a rorschach oh it's like a rorschach thing sure or like like which one looks which one looks nicer which one looks meaner you know that sort of thing i'm a kiki type like like i i am a kiki in terms in my behavior. Garrison, now that you bring up Rorschach, all I can think of is how cool it would be if Rorschach from The Watchmen showed up in Nate Silver's house and did his thing.
Unfortunately, I think Rorschach and Nate Silver might actually get along. They would become fast friends.
Actually, yeah. No, no, Nate would, but after them getting along for like 45 minutes, Nate would take him to an illegal card game and Rorschach would murder everybody in the room because they were gambling without a license.
So I'm assuming Nate's going to try to argue that Musk's intelligence is akin to the kiki drawing here as opposed to like the empathetic boba right now they're actually yes there is a little bit of that in there he does not mention this kiki and boba thing i don't know if that's because i'm supposed to just infer it from the image or if he's okay we'll get your opinion on it is he ripping these people off because this doesn't count as enough for him to be crediting them if this is the underpinning of his stupid idea, which he credits to his stupid book that he came up with later. But I'm just going to start reading the stupid column.
Well, hit us with the second paragraph, because that fucking looks good. We haven't gotten paragraph one, James.
Okay, that radicalized me immediately. There's been a debate raging on Twitter.
Noah Smith can run you through the parameters about the intelligence of the platform's owner, Elon Musk. My contribution was to suggest, and then there's a little I in parentheses because we need that, Elon is obviously pretty bright, and then there's two I's in parentheses.
This shouldn't be conflated with moral judgment. Highly intelligent people do lots of bad things.
Okay. You'd think this wouldn't be especially controversial, but since it involves Elon and intelligence, well, it was.
Elon has run, founded, or co-founded Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI, Neuralink, XAI, PayPal, and more recently, Twitter. He's also managed to steer himself into a position where he's now the de facto chief of staff to the president of the United States.
I do not doubt that Elon has gotten lucky in various respects. Some of these were long-shot bets.
In Walter Isaacson's biography of Musk documents, he thought he'd be ruined if there had been one more failed SpaceX launch. The success of some of these enterprises might also be debated.
Yes. Twitter was a canny play for cultural and political influence.
And he doesn't bring up in this whole thing where he's talking about like all his successful companies, not a word about the boring company. Not a word about Hyperloop.
Right? Yeah, any of the failed ones. His record does seem better if you ignore the two massively publicized and invested absolute failures.
Yes. Well, and last week, I know there was a SpaceX launch.
I'm sure it went well. I'm sure it didn't fling debris all over the lower atmosphere.
I'm sure he didn't nearly destroy several commercial aircraft. Also, crediting it like, yeah, I guess technically co-founded OpenAI, but not in a way that mattered.
He just shot down money in there and then kind of edged out. Yeah.
Sure. Yes.
And is actively in a conflict with everybody who did make OpenAI as prominent as it is. Again, Nate has to leave a lot out in order to start making this case.
But he's going to argue that, you know, we're going to see how how well this co-presidency goes. But he's probably a pretty smart guy to get all of this stuff done.
And he's also saying, well, like maybe Twitter won't be profitable, but we'll see how, you know, he could probably profit from being the de facto chief of staff. Not a word from Nate about like, yeah, but he's just like, that's just breaking the law.
So why are, why are we, why aren't we including in our canny businessman guys that get rich selling like shit loads of heroin for the cartels? Because yes, if you are breaking the law, sometimes that goes well for you financially. Walter White may have done some bad things, but you can't deny he was a brilliant meth cook, you know? But I don't care what Elon's SAT score is.
1,400, according to Isaacson. He's clearly some sort of outlier in many ways people would associate with intelligence, probably even a genius.
And yet, first off, it becomes clear through this that Nate does not consider not consider a 1400 to be an impressive sat score and would normally be judgmental of someone who had an sat score of 1400 if it weren't for all of elon's other genius accomplishments and yet when my partner and i were heading to dinner the other day and we saw some tweet that elon sent i forget which one because he tweets so much we were both like man he's such a's such a dumbass. Yes, someone can be both a genius and a dumbass.
Welcome to what I call spiky intelligence. Here we go.
This gets to like the core of what's annoying about Nate is his need to he's one of these guys. You know, you know what it is? He's an intellectual enclosureist, right? Where he's not confident to be like, everyone is very aware of the fact

that no one is good at everything,

and that people have holes in their competence,

and that there are like brilliant surgeons

who are bad fathers or whatever,

because there are different kinds of intelligence.

This is like a broadly common understanding.

Nate has to give it a name

so that he can sell his book.

So he gives it the names.

It's like an intellectual,

no, it's my idea. I'm the one who came up with the concept that smart people can be dumbasses.
Stop it, Nate. It's annoying.
Capital S, capital I, registered trademark spiky intelligence. Yeah.
Yeah. Now, he acknowledges that this isn't entirely original and then links to somebody without really, like, crediting them.
Interestingly, many of the instances online refer to people on the autism spectrum.

Musk has publicly stated that he has Asperger's syndrome, but the concept is simple.

While intelligence is a multidimensional phenomenon, the scientific consensus is that

there's also something known as a G factor, sometimes also called general intelligence.

As an empirical matter, most traits we'd associate with intelligence are positively correlated. For instance, math and verbal skills in the GRE are correlated.
The correlations are loose enough that you'll wind up with all sorts of different permutations on the spectrum of human behavior. And he's just going into, like, he talks about, like, the absent-minded professor.
Like, it's all just these very common ideas that, like, yeah, people are usually bad at more things than they're good at. Right? Like it's, there's no need to explain like how Elon Musk has been successful at certain things.
But Nate does. And he has to keep going back to, like, he makes a comment later in here about how Musk is clearly a brilliant engineer.
He doesn't back this up with evidence. He just says that like, well, if you read the book that Ashley Vance wrote, he obviously signed off on a lot of great engineering moves, which ignores the fact that, like, he's not making any of these decisions.
Like, he bought a company that already had good automotive technology. He hired a bunch of rocket engineers to design rockets.
Elon is arguably good at hiring in certain circumstances, and he is inarguably a great hype man, right? Like, that's the actual brilliance that Elon has, is he was very, very good at hyping people up and getting people to believe in him until he was too big to fail. Like, that's the one thing he actually did.
But Nate can't accept that because I think it kind of, among other things, it kind of reveals

what Nate is, who is a guy who was really good at one narrow thing and now has a career writing

about everything. And he can't, that's like a dangerous thing for Nate to think too hard about.

Let's learn more about Nate's spiky intelligence after these very soft and soothing ads. Yeah.
We're back. I want to talk a little bit about the danger of being a guy who gets famous for being really good at one thing and then gets a job talking about everything because I've had a version of that experience.
And let me tell you, you're not ever going to be competent to discuss all of the things that you can make money talking about if you're a popular entertainer. No one ever has been.
No one ever will be, which is why what you ought to do is the thing Nate initially tried to do, which is bring on a bunch of people to run a website with you, right? Where you cover more things than one. Unfortunately, it turns out FiveThirtyEight was a bad business venture.
It got massively overvalued. A company spent a shitload more money on it that it was capable of making, and now everyone's gotten laid off.
And Nate left years ago to do his sub-stack. You know, it's a tragic case in the problem of, like, hubris and the fact that maybe a guy who's really good at gambling shouldn't run an entire media enterprise.
But Nate doesn't like thinking about that. It doesn't like thinking about the fact that maybe the only thing Elon Musk was ever good at was being the guy from The Music Man.
Because I think Nate bought into Elon Musk for a significant period of time. A lot of people did.
He still clearly does. Yes.
Yeah. There's been this thing lately where a lot of folks on the left have been like, oh, you couldn't always tell that he was a con man.
You couldn't always tell that he was this bad. Like, he was always the worst.
I was like, no. Like, back in 2014-15, when I was writing about the billionaires and rich people that were evil, I was focusing on Jamie Dimon because he had helped create the 2008 financial collapse.
And he just seemed obviously much worse than this guy who up to that point was pretty much just making cars and rockets, you know, he had two companies doing that. Musk was not top of most people's radars for a very good reason, which gets to like, there's this thing that's been created because of some of like the sinister beliefs that his grandfather had and his like family background, which has a lot of white supremacy in it to that, that, that this has been Elon sort of like grand plan from the beginning, and that it's all come together for him, like, as if he's, you know, a Marvel or a James Bond villain who's been executing this, like, 30-year plan to get where he is.
Yeah, yeah. I think when you look at his cognition, like, he's not the same man he was 10 years ago.
He's not the same guy he was when he started dating Grimes. I'm not saying he was a good man before then.
I don't think he particularly ever was. But he's clearly, his brain has degraded, in part due to contact through Twitter.
Yeah, and you can measure this through his posting as well. The types of posts he would make in 2017 are completely opposite to the way that he would talk about certain social issues now.
Oh, yeah. He's not, like, memeing about, like, anarcho-syndicalism.
Yeah. We get to a few of those things, but I want to read another quote from Nate's article because he's going to talk about his book On the Edge, which, quote, describes a certain community of intelligent people that I call the river.
These people who occupy a range of professions from AI research to poker to venture capital are bright, but in spiky ways. In Baron Cohen's dichotomy, they lean heavily towards the systematic side of the equation.
They're good at abstract analytic reasoning, but they may lack other forms of intelligence like empathy, judgment, and self-awareness. They also have some distinctive characteristics largely unrelated to intelligence.
For example, they tend to be extraordinarily competitive and somewhat contrarian. And again, what you are talking about, all of these people, number one, when he says AI research, he's not talking about people who are doing like the gut level coding.
He's talking about Sam Altman, right? Poker, venture capital. This is all gambling.
you're all talking about gamblers the river is just gamblers nate it's people like you who who put money on bets and they are contrarian and competitive because that's how gamblers are that's that's the intelligent that's the river like he's thinking about it as like this specific specific chunk of intellectuals who have you know, there's some dangers, but they have great potential to make the world brilliant. I'm like, no, no, no.
No, these are just people who wind up shooting themselves outside of a sports betting facility. That's the river, Nate.
I have been turning into a monster during our friend poker nights recently.

It's tough.

Garrison, by the way, I've been meaning to talk to you about wearing the full data makeup.

Because you know your skin can't breathe if you coat your whole body.

You're only supposed to put that on your face.

I don't do that every time I play.

You're going to goldfinger yourself, Garrison.

I don't put on the data makeup every time I play poker.

Just that one time. Actually, no, I've done that twice now.
Never mind. I have done that two times.
It's becoming a habit. I also have the little hats.
I ordered a 12-pack of the little poker visors to complete the outfit. Of course you did.
Wonderful. Of course you did.
It would be rude not to. For better or worse, this typology, the river, is associated with high achievement in certain highly lucrative professions, especially tech and finance.
It is also associated with high variance. Sam Bankman-Fried built FTX into a company that investors valued at $32 billion before the house of cards collapsed.
Again, because he was a gambler. Yeah, because he was a con man.
And again, Nate can't just accept, oh, he was never actually very smart. He just got really lucky for a while and then gambled it all away because he wasn't actually as smart as anyone thought.
Nate says, I interviewed SPF several times for the book and I can tell you that he very much falls into the genius but dumbass category. How about just dumbass? Lucky dumbass.
It's not hard. What's the genius? Where did he prove that? I mean, he proved that by fooling Nate Silver, a man who probably values his own intelligence like a great deal.
Yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing, right? Nate Silver can't, like, it would be ego death to admit that there were just some lucky dumb white dudes. Yeah.
If a guy had won, like, one of the lotteries

where it was like a billion and a half dollars, right,

got crazy rich, and then lost it all in two weeks

because he just kept putting half a million dollars at a time

on 21 black at a roulette table in Vegas,

and I would be like, well, obviously he's a genius,

but he's also kind of a dumbass.

How else could he have made the money in the first place?

No, he got lucky, and then he gambled it all away because he doesn't have good judgment. Yeah.
So it's important to avoid two pitfalls when encountering people with spiky intelligence. Namely, neither their worst traits nor their best ones tell the whole story.
And I don't disagree with that. However, it's a meaningless statement because that's true of every human being ever born.
Yeah. But clearly Nate doesn't feel that way because only, I think the undercurrent here is that only people like this in Nate's mind are worth talking about because only gamblers bring the world forward, right? Yeah, no one else deserves empathy.
Yeah, yes. Like, you're just addicted to putting money on sports games and elections, Nate Silver.
Anyway, so here's the two things he wants to warn us of, or wants people to avoid. Elon is highly intelligent in several ways, but that does not mean that everything he does is brilliant.
Some things he does are exceptionally dumb or dangerous, and we shouldn't make excuses for them. But likewise, it's absurd to suggest that Elon isn't brilliant in many respects just because he isn't in others.
And if he has merely very good SAT scores, I don't care. Nobody does.
It's not high school. Nobody cares about his SAT skills.
Elon's what, like 50, like 55 or something? Like, what are we doing? Yeah. You are a middle-aged man.
I don't even know what my SAT score was. I was going to say, I never took an SAT, but I spent more than a decade in full-time education, and anyone who ever told me their SAT scores, I immediately hated and never took them seriously.
I've spent almost 20 years asking people questions for a living, and I've never asked anyone their SAT score. Sorry, Garrison.
Although SAT might not be a stable metric for evaluating intelligence, surely Nate has an alternative method. Absolutely not, Garrison.
Just how much... Well, he does actually...
He does have an alternative method. I'm seeing what you might call an infographic.
Because the next section of the article is a quick inventory of Elon's intelligence. So, first he admits he tried to track Elon down for his stupid book, but he couldn't get him to talk to him.
I have to say, Elon does have better shit to do than talk to Nate Silver, because Elon is abusing ketamine to a near fatal degree, and that is a better use of his time than talking to Nate Silver. So, since he can't actually talk to Musk, he's going to model and extrapolate from, quote, many other Silicon Valley bigwigs I have met.
Okay. Helping him in this is the fact that, quote, Musk maintains an extremely public profile.
He's turned X into a running diary of his innermost thoughts. And in addition to that, the biographies of the guy.
One more caveat here. I will try to evaluate the overall trajectory of Elon's career, not just his recent antics.
So we go down here and the next segment is dimensions where Musk has exceptionally high or genius level intelligence. So finally, Nate's going to prove it.
And I'm going to I'm going to show you guys how he how he how he chooses to do that. What the evidence he gives us here is.
And I think this is something that we should reveal to the audience after these ads. Good point, Gare.
Alright, we're back. So let's look at what Nate shows as the chief dimension where Musk has shown

high or genius level intelligence.

I'm just reading that first line, man.

So the first words under this are

cognitive load capacity and overall horsepower slash RAM.

He's always on.

I mean, literally, look at how often he's tweeting.

And then a huge graph that shows the density

of tweets posted in Wynn,

which has been used by other people to prove

that since sometime in late 2022, he's almost never gone more than about three hours without posting a tweet. Like, it's just a solid red after he buys the site.
This, like, graph of, like, when he makes his posts. He's never offline now.
He's not sleeping. So a graph of elon musk's tweets from 2014 to 2024 uh showing the time of day and when a post is posted represented by small red dots and yes at around 2022 the thickness of the red increases dramatically it's almost just a straight red line the period of where he must be sleeping in this graph is very concerning.
No, he sometimes sleeps from about 6 to 9 a.m. as far as we can tell.
But not regularly or often. That's like a streak of 2023 where he just isn't sleeping.
He's not sleeping. And again, he's on drugs, people.
I think they're probably pres prescriptive i think i'm certain he's on ketamine that has been prescribed when you're this rich you just get whatever drugs you want to do recreationally prescribed right but this is drug user behavior i don't say that to judge drug users i say that as someone who had a drug problem like this is drug drug user behavior. And specifically Silver is using this.
And Elon's sobriety is possible. Sorry.
And specifically Silver is using this as evidence of Musk's intelligence. Yeah.
It's not. He's scaling his Twitter activity as a sign that he must be like a special type of person.
Yeah. He's railing Adderall and eating ketamine lozenges all day, every day.
That's what this is a sign of, and no one is allowed to take his phone away. Anyway, here's how Nate explains why this is smart.
In NBA terms, we say this is a player with an exceptionally high motor, and this is undoubtedly a valuable trait as the world becomes more complex. Last fall, I was simultaneously doing an extensive book media tour, running the election model, trying to build up Silver Bulletin, plus some intensive consulting work.
Even if I mostly kept my wits about me, it was an incredible amount of mental and physical strain that would only have been sustainable for a short burst. But Elon is taking on, I don't know, approximately a thousand times more stress than that and has done so for years.
No, he's not. He just tweets.
He has a massive, number one, all of the businesses are being run by people who are specialists in those businesses. He gets called on to sit in meetings and say yes or no to stuff and occasionally tells them to do something crazy that causes issues, right? And they're not running smoothly.
Tesla's lost more value now than it gained after the election. And SpaceX just had a giant rocket explode.
Again, the boring company has not done anything other than make a useless hole underneath Vegas. And the Hyperloop is nothing, right? Like, this is just full of shit, Nate.

Like, what you have just described,

running an election model that's functional,

going on a book tour and consulting and writing a newsletter,

is more work than I credit Elon Musk with actually doing.

Oh, yeah.

More actual effort work, right?

Musk is mostly, like, sitting in an occasional meeting,

doing drugs and injecting random women with his sperm. Yes.
And sending tweets. He doesn't do the injecting, I think.
Oh, God! Garrison, that comes up too! No! No! No! And it's crazy how it does. Right before, he posts the graph of how much Elon tweets.
Okay, God, there it is! Okay, okay. Politics and social media poison a lot of people's brains.
Having that much wealth and power has to be intoxicating, especially if Musk ostracizes people who might keep him grounded. More sympathetically, he's taking on an incredible array of responsibilities, doing several really hard jobs at once, each of which would be stressful on their own, while still managing to father 13 children and tweeting hundreds of times per week.
Again, equivalent efforts. Tweeting hundreds of times a week and fathering 13 children.
He's not a father to them. No, he just...
He contributed by... He didn't even have sex.
It is literally the lowest possible effort way to have a child. Like, I'm going to guess most of the people with penises listening to this come.
Like, that's not a big effort. You wouldn't include that as like, what did I get done this week? Well, in addition to working 40 hours, I jacked off.
That's a little transphobic, son. I said most.
This is an HRT joke. Anyway, continue.
I said, I'm just saying it doesn't count as work. No, no.
Certainly not from us. Unless you're a sex worker, then it does.
Especially, I know a lot of male porn stars. That is a difficult part of the job.
That's why they inject their penises directly with erection drugs that kill their hearts. I would like to get into more of Silver's justification for why he associates this high tweet load with intelligence.
Well, because it shows rapid cognition and thin slicing ability. Okay.
Mm-hmm. All right.
Sure, man. Indeed, in a capitalist system with a significant premium on being first to market, making decent judgments fast is often more important than making better judgments slowly.
Canonically, VCs imagine themselves rapidly filtering through potential founders as though on Shark Tank, relying on well-honed gut instinct. But this also gets people in trouble, as it has for Elon.
What is Shark Tank's success rate? Yeah. I bet there's a quick answer to that yeah and let's continue that it has built in free

television advertising for any product less than 50 of deals are successfully closed my god yeah

so i i i don't know all this tweeting also shows abstract problem solving capability this is

related to the idea of creativity though in musk's case it seemingly doesn't manifest itself

Thank you. All his tweeting also shows abstract problem-solving capability.
This is related to the idea of creativity,

though in Musk's case, it seemingly doesn't manifest itself in artistic prowess.

Seemingly. Seemingly.

You know what? I'll give it to Nate there. I'll give it to Nate.

I don't disagree with you there.

And then, of course, instrumental rationality.

Philosophy nerds like to distinguish between two types of rationality.

Instrumental rationality is aligning means with ends, basically figuring out the most efficient ways to get what you want. For this category, I think you have to point towards the scoreboard.
Musk has some unparalleled accomplishments and isn't about to let anybody stand in his way. It's also a category often associated with manipulativeness or even being an asshole, not one for nice guys.
Now, and again, if Musk's actual goal is his stated goal, getting to Mars, then backing the political party that is actively doing as much damage to the biosphere as possible, ensuring that it will not have the carrying capacity necessary to make any kind of off-world civilization likely, I would argue, is a stupid decision. But he doesn't actually want us to get to Mars, right? He just wants to be in charge of everything.
No, he wants to run his businesses with no government interference. That's really all it is.
Yes, yes. And he has been very successful at that.
But again, it's the success of brute force. It's the same way as if you hire a thousand people who are willing to break the kneecaps of guy who annoys you.
Like you could say like I'm very smart when it comes to hurting people who annoy me. But really, you just have a lot of dudes who can beat people up for you.
Like, is that intelligence or did you just have enough money to hire thugs? Or are you just a mob boss? Are you just a mob boss? And a mob boss no one is allowed to attack because it's going to be domestic terror to fuck up a tesla store soon you know anyway we need ghost dog it's pretty it's pretty upsetting because you know a few weeks ago i was having a little bit of a resist live moment and i actually ashed my clove cigarette on a parked tesla felt pretty cool about it but now i guess i can't even do that it's too too dangerous. No, you can't.
I could face substantial charges. You might want to text resist to a certain five-digit number or something.
That's probably the best way to solve this garrison. I just text resist to every single person in my phone book every day.
It takes about seven hours. I have fallen behind on work.
But it's the only thing we can do to fight fascism. The quickest path to intelligence is having a horrible sleep deprivation and drug problem, apparently.
Or at least that is how you show for it. It's funny because I saw Brian Johnson, the billionaire who's eating his son's blood, or now plasma.
Oh, yeah, the dead guy. Posted his own self-study on the damaging effects of sleep deprivation and i'm pretty sure musk like retweeted it with like with like an emoji or something i'm like yeah dude dude your brain is completely soup no you you are you are fried you are the most cooked a man has ever been it's an interesting study like there there is legitimately interesting things to look at in Elon Musk's brain.

Well, yes, and there's a lot of actual scientific data put together exhaustively by researchers studying how not just sleep deprivation, but wealth and power impact the brain. and like all of it makes a strong case that Elon Musk at this point

has done more damage to his brain

than like a career,

one of those career WWE wrestlers

who like kills their whole family

and then shoots themselves in the chest so someone can study their brain later. Yeah, I mean...
Well, before we close, I do want to say, before any psychologists or sociologists or linguists get mad at me, yes, I know Boba and Kiki is a shape language like correlation test. I myself, as well as Nate here, have kind of expanded its usage to like projecting even more like human or like emotional qualities onto these shapes or onto these specific words.
So please, sociologists, leave me alone. Do not message me.
Please send Garrison your favorite French sociologist by direct message on x.com. I'm afraid it's already too late.
I think I already hear like 12 different Redditors typing. But yes, I think Nate's just using that image there as like a metaphor to like show how you know aggressive or manipulative musk's own intelligence is as symbolized by a by a kiki as opposed to you know maybe maybe like a bill gates which might be more of like a boba intelligence type okay a little softer a little bit more philanthropy you know i just got finished reading nothing but rationalist and zizian literature for two straight weeks.
About a quarter of a million words by my last count, Garrison. I don't have it in me to do this.
Again, I'm going to get back to my Hitler books, you know, where things make sense, where the world is comforting and safe. I'm returning to writing about the Syrian Civil War, which is my comparative happy place.
Ah, the Syrian Civil War. Yeah, it's a really great world.
I do wonder if he's trying to avoid some kind of intellectual property thing by using that little filter that he used over to Booba and Kiki. No, because it would be,

it's actually not fair use now

as opposed to

if he just mentioned that thing.

Yeah, he doesn't talk about them.

Then it is fair use, right?

And he could use

like a little clip of it

to illustrate the point.

Yeah, like I did with Manu Chow.

Anyway, this is all I want to say

again about Nate Silver

until 2028.

And if, you know what,

the upside, if democracy really does die, is we'll never have to talk about him again. If Trump and Musk really take over fully and do a full coup, we never have to talk about Nate Silver.
Cut to nine minutes from now, I'm wearing a Curtis Yarvin t-shirt. No, but they'll be doing Assad numbers, and he will still be analyzing that data straight regime capture of nate silver well it doesn't seem possible that trump could have gotten 104 of the vote but those are spiky percentages those are spiky percentages why can't nate silver just like run like trump's casino or something right this is just like just like put him away.
I understand if Nate, because Nate's rich. He doesn't need to do the other stuff.
And if he was like just doing sports betting analysis forever, I'd be like, well, yeah, that's what he loves, right? If I had Nate's silver money, I'd probably just write novels for the rest of my life because that's what I like to do. I don't understand why he keeps writing about politics.
He's not good at it, and he can't like it.

He needs to feel special.

He wants to feel like a special boy who knows the answers that no one else does.

All right.

Well, anyway, this is us making fun of Nate Silver.

So you don't, well, you can still make fun of him, but you don't have to read him.

We did that for you.

Good night. This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling of the world, and what it means for you.
I'm Garrison Davis. Today, I'm joined by Mia Wong and Robert Evans.
This episode, we're covering the week of March 5 to March 12. Trump films a Tesla commercial, RFK Jr.
eats beef tallow french fries at Steak and Shake. And Sam Seder commits a mass casualty event on YouTube.
How's everyone doing today? Very happy to join you for ED this week. Huge fan of ED.
Just like, just big, big ED guy. So, you know, psyched to be here.
I feel like we should mention up top, there's also a bunch of unhinged tariff news and the most like electing fucking Caligula's horse to the Senate thing I've seen in a long time. So stay tuned for that.
Lots of good stuff. Yes, we will get to it.
First, I would like to give a little bit of an update on a story that we talked about a few days ago, the detention and the revocation of a green card for a Palestinian activist, Mahmoud Khalil. As of Wednesday, his lawyers have still been unable to even contact their client.
There was a large rally outside the first court conference in New York this Wednesday. So we talked about this a few days ago for some background, an episode with James, Robert, and myself.
Robert, do you want to briefly summarize the situation, and then I'll play a clip from one of his lawyers? The situation is that this guy got taken into custody. My understanding is it was at an apartment that he lived in with his wife.
He was a U.S. citizen.
He became aware, it looks like, at least about 24 hours before, probably became aware that he was being, it's a little clear if he was just like being surveilled or there was something else that tipped them off, but he contacted the school asking for help, convinced that ICE was coming for him about a day before they did. When they entered the house, my understanding is based on the claims being made by his wife that they did not like they didn't like produce a warrant or anything.
He's still not charged with any crime. No, he's not been charged with any crime.
They just took him and like turned off the phone when they were on the phone to their lawyers, if I'm if I'm remembering correctly. Correct.
So it's like none of this is the way this should have gone. Like if this was an arrest.
No, he was just like black bagged from campus. Yeah, but it's not an arrest again.
And they've been very clear about this, that like they have specifically stated we're not accusing him of like breaking the law. Right.
Like that's that's not what's going on here. Correct.
And we will get to some of that later. I'm going to play a clip from a press conference outside court that happened on Wednesday,

March 12th. This is one of his lawyers.

Mr. Khalil's detention has nothing to do with security.

It is only about repression.

The United States government has taken the position that it can arrest, detain, and seek

to deport a lawful permanent resident exclusively because of his peaceful, constitutionally protected activism. In this case, activism in support of Palestinian human rights and an end to the genocide in Gaza.
The government takes the position that because the Secretary of State finds his dissent unacceptable or contrary to U.S. foreign policy, he can be deported.
As Ramsey suggested, it's largely unprecedented save for ugly historical precedents, including the Red Scare and McCarthyism. That's what we're talking about.
We're also talking about a period of repression that the Center for Constitutional Rights knows well following 9-11 when we were in the courts trying to get people out of secret detention. One thing that's different now is the legal infrastructure is so much stronger and everyone out here on the streets knows that we cannot hide in the face of this amount of repression.
We will be fighting in the courts and fighting in the streets to bring Mahmoud home and prevent this level of repression from spreading to many others, as the administration has threatened to do. So that was on Wednesday.
For now, Khalil will be remaining in ICE detention in Louisiana. And ICE director Tom Homan said Wednesday that, quote, free speech has its limitations, unquote.
Yeah, I have found some stuff today of people on the right attacking the judge who put out a, I guess, called a stay on this, in part because the judge is Jewish. So it's nice to see the anti-Semitism being used in that way as well in this instance.
Just fascinating. We're really breaking new ground in all of this.
A White House official did tell Friend of the Pod, the Free Press, not necessarily our favorite publication, but they do have an exclusive quote here, that the basis for targeting Khalil is being used as a blueprint for investigations against other students. saying Khalil is, quote, a threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States, unquote, said the official, noting that this calculation was the driving force behind the arrest, saying, quote, the allegation here is not that he was breaking the law.
So we have this official, like, openly saying, like, he's not charged with a crime. We're just wanting to see if we can do this.
Can we deport a legal permanent resident for saying something that we don't like? Yeah, and I think that there's been a lot of comparisons to this to direct McCarthyism. I think that's accurate to some extent.
I think the most direct comparison to this is not McCarthyism. It's the Palmer raids.
Yep. Which I think people tend to be way less familiar with.
That was the first Red Scare, which was largely targeted at the industrial workers of the world for their opposition to World War I. And they did basically the same shit.
A lot of people would give anti-war speeches, and then a whole bunch of IWW organizers and other sort of leftists would get fucking deported for it. So, yeah, that was an absolutely terrifying period of repression.
If the line is not drawn here, and it should have been drawn like 200 miles back from here, but if it isn't drawn here, this is going to continue. This is going to continue to get worse.
And I mean, all of this is in relation to Trump's executive order, you know, about quote unquote, anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, today in the Oval Office, he said something incredibly anti-Semitic and also anti-Arab somehow in the same statement, saying, quote, Schumer is a Palestinian as far as I'm concerned.
He's become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish.
He's not Jewish anymore. He's a Palestinian, unquote, which is just an unbelievably anti-Semitic and anti-Arab statement all at once, like removing someone's Jewishness because of how they act or things they've said or things they believe in.
Yeah. And it's one of those things, again, like it's worth like covering this as it develops.
There's not much to say other than like, this is incredibly illegal and has to be opposed immediately and vigorously. Like, yeah, yeah.
No, it's really bad. And of course, you're not going to have the ADL coming out against trump here the aclu did i which i should note because i heard some people saying they did not expect the aclu to they have but yeah the adl is fully in the camp of lock anyone up who's ever protested israel and they're not going to call trump anti-semitic for making a statement like this yeah because their interests are are fairly aligned this point, re what's happening in Gaza.

So I think now we're going to play a special report from James, who can't be on the recording here today, but he does have a report on deportations in Panama. So James, take it away.
So something that we've seen in the last week is that the people who the US government has deported to Panama, who it can't deport to their home countries, have in some cases been released by the Panamanian government and given a 30-day visa or 30 days to essentially exit Panama. And they're not really being given any support.
So they're in some cases just sleeping on the streets in Panama City, right, just wandering around, trying to work out how to get home and trying to work out like what they should do next. Obviously, these people who have fled places like Afghanistan, Iran, places where they can't go back to, they would face persecution just for the act of having tried to leave, even if they weren't already facing persecution before, which many of them were, but that's why they fled.
So they've just kind of kicked it down

the road a little bit, and we'll see where this leads. But it's another piece of evidence that

this wasn't hugely well planned, that the Trump administration just wanted to get these deportation

numbers up at almost any cost. All right, we're going to go on a break and come back to talk about

the Department of Education and tariff Talk with Mia Wong. Wow.
Well, we are back. And, you know, it's everyone's favorite time of the podcast talking about tariffs and before we get to mia

i want to bring on a musical guest to set this section of the program up

Oh, yeah. Oh, my gosh.
That was worth the rest of our year's budget. Now, everyone will be getting paid for the rest of the year in Denny's coupons.
That's all we have left after paying for this. But I think we can all agree worth it.
Do you want to explain what that is? Because I still don't really have a clue what exactly that opening theme song is for Tariff Talk. Well, there was a great band called The Clash once, and they wrote one song that wasn't very good.
And in it, somebody says something that didn't sound very much like the word tariff, but if you mispronounce the word tariff, it fit in. And that's where $42,000 of our operating budget this year went.
Anyway, Mia, let's talk about tariffs. Yeah, now that I've gotten one of the two things I've ever wanted in life, play on music.
So since last week, this has been an entire roller coaster because right after we finished recording in like the next two days, everyone went, oh, the tariffs aren't going to be that bad because a lot of the tariffs that were hit with Trump's sort of general 25 percent Canada Mexico tariff got waived after Trump agreed not to apply them to goods covered by the USMCA free trade agreements. But then everyone remembered that the 25 percent steel and aluminum tariff was still going into effect.
And so that went into effect this week. Now, there was also a brief, incredible moment of panic where Trump was talking about doubling them to 50%.
He backs off of this in exchange for Ontario's Doug Ford stopping a like 25% increase in electricity prices. However, comma, the trade war is 100% still on.

Canada is doing a whole sort of slate of reciprocal tariffs, specifically on steel, and also tariffs and taxes on a whole suite of other U.S. goods.
I'm just going to read this from the Associated Press because this is no longer, the trade war here is no longer limited to the U.S., Canada, China, and to some extent Mexico. So Mexico's really hasn't been responding in the same way as basically every other country who's come under these tariffs, or at least the sort of main focuses of these tariffs.
But this week, the EU officially joined the fray. So here's from the AP, quote, across the Atlantic, the European Union will raise tariffs on American beef, poultry, bourbon, and motorcycles.
Bourbon again? Yeah, yeah, bourbon twice.

Yeah, bourbon twice.

It's twice as important as the other things.

Yes, peanut butter and jeans.

Actually, you say this, there was a whole,

like, part of the whole speech.

That was not a joke, Mia.

People from the EU, like, this was part of the thing,

was, yeah, like, we're hoping to restore

the profitability of the American spirits markets

when the U.S. backs down.

It was also the only American product that Trudeau could name during his big speech. Very funny.
Let's be honest. Outside of music, this nation has produced one thing of value to the world, and it's bourbon.
Pretty reasonable. It's also very funny that it was like bourbon was like our what attempt number was it at making whiskey before we finally got one that was like exportable? Terrible.
Oh, I mean, yeah, it took it took generations. Look, you know, Rome wasn't built in a day and bourbon is the Rome of liquors produced in Kentucky.
Yeah. Well, and speaking of it being produced in Kentucky, this is actually deliberately.
OK, well, all right. So the EU, in theory, the line that they're saying is that these are deliberately designed to like target things that are made in red states they also did do soybean tariffs too though which is you know like you're dropping a nuke on illinois here okay so the eu has imposed reciprocal tariffs on 28 billion dollars of u.S.
goods. Also on Tuesday, China's

tariffs went into effect, which means the agricultural tariffs that we talked about last week. And notably, I keep coming back to soybeans because soybeans are such a critical part of the system of American agriculture as the crop that you rotate out with corn to sort of like preserve soil integrity.
The Chinese tariffs are now in effect. It's mostly on agricultural goods.
yeah and and this has, I think, in ways that are pretty predictable, at least to me, this has caused a lot of panic in the markets. There's been some sort of rallying as like more information comes in.
But there's stuff that I did not predict, which is so, OK, Goldman Sachs has downgraded its projection for U.S. GDP growth.
their chief economist is talking about how he thinks we're going to get stagflation again, which is sort of wild stagflation was the thing in the 70s that was, you know, like you have inflation and unemployment growth at the same time. This is basically the economic condition that liquidated the welfare state and allowed the right to take power in the first place.
That's funny because when I Google stagflation, I get very different results. That could just be my own...
That's stagflation garrison. Two very different things.
Oh, sorry. Yeah, I think I missed that.
Anyway, the things I have to deal with on this job. They didn't warn me.
You got your music now. It's true.
It's true. It's true.
This makes up for a lot. If you ever get to fight The Undertaker, you have a song to go on to.
It's true. So, okay.
Now, sort of more surprisingly, and this is something I have literally never seen before with the U.S. Both Citibank, well, Citi, which is the over...
Citibank, like, changed its name to Citi or something. But Citibank and UBS, the giant Swiss bank, downgraded the status of all U.S.
equities.

I have never seen anything like this in my entire life.

They are also boosting the status of Chinese and EU equities.

This doesn't have a technical official effect, but this is their their evaluation of what countries like stocks basically you should purchase right and this is also sort of applies to bonds so is that bad this is like i assumed that the u.s would get its actual credit rating devalued before this happens i've never this is this is unreal like the argument that they are making here is that it is because of the instability in the u.s like because because of the tariffs and because of everything that's going on that like you should just fucking pull your money out of the out of the u.s and american companies and put it somewhere else and they're specifically boosting the status of chinese and eu equities which is astonishing because again one of one of the one of the countries again whose equity status that they are boosting is china china's economy is a fucking disaster right now they're dealing with like their fucking housing bubble going under they've been trying to do this pivot to a consumer-based economy for years and years and years and years and it doesn't work because they don't pay people enough to actually like fuel an economy by consumer spending like they're you know they're about to take giant damage from the trade war and also that like you know like it was only like three years ago the ccp faced their first like nationwide mass protest like since tiananmen right and these guys like and again these are these are the financial analysts of citibank and ubs have looked at that and went you are better off putting your money there than you are putting it in the u.s i mean at point, I think Trump's tariffs have wiped out, I'm reading, $4 trillion from the U.S. stock market just in this past month.
Now, trillion, is that... Okay, so for example, I have $32 right now in my pocket.
Is it more than that? I think it's a little bit more. Okay, Okay.
Okay. So it is enough to buy two different servings of pizza.

Okay.

This is, I'm trying to put this into terms I can understand.

Thank you.

It is, imagine one burger, right?

And a burger in Portland does cost $32.

So yes.

Yes.

Now, imagine, I thought you were going to say a burger in Portland does cost $4 trillion.

I mean, probably tomorrow, right?

Like, who knows?

I don't know.

Eggs, man.

The fucking plagues that we're doing.

We're adding levity because this is legitimately kind of frightening.

No, like, this is, I have never seen a financial press like this.

Like, the only times I've ever seen a financial press react to something like this is like,

they were kind of acting like this about the possibility of Jeremy Corbyn, like taking power in the UK. Like they are like I watched a guy on CNBC.
Right. This is not like this is this is not MSNBC.
This is not even like CNN. This is CNBC.
Literally go on air and call what Trump is doing, quote, insane and start talking about how and this is something this is i think what these people are worried about is they're you know the thing that they're seeing that's starting right now and it's starting with these sort of with these downgrades of u.s equities is capital flight which is straight up a butt like international capital taking their money from the u.s and fucking literally moving out of the country moving it somewhere else because the u.s is so unstable This is I don't know if anyone knows what mass capital flight from the U.S. would do because I've never seen anything like this.
So part of what's going on, right, part of the reason the markets have kind of recovered in the last few days after the tanking they did Monday is that like the inflation data came out and it wasn't that bad. But the thing is, all of the inflation data we're getting right now and all of the economic indicators we're getting right now it's going to take a little bit of time for the actual effects of these tariffs to set in right like these are these are things that like you know it's going to take it's going to take like six months maybe a year before we fully see the impacts of that and but and when we do it is going to fucking blow a smoking crater into the economy and the worst part about this is this isn't even the most unhinged part of this.
The most unhinged part of this is how the Republicans have been reacting to all of this in Congress. So one of the few things the Democrats have been trying to do, and I say one of the few because like the response has been downright collaborationist, but they've been trying to force Republicans to take a vote on the tariffs because the tariffs are unbelievably unpopular.
And they're particularly unbelievably unpopular among like the capital owning class who, you know, actually matter. So what they've been trying to do is that Trump did these tariffs by declaring a state of emergency.
And the Democrats wanted to use the National Emergencies Act to force a vote on the tariffs. I'm just going to read this from the New York Times.
The national emergency law

lays out a fast track process

for Congress to consider a resolution

ending a presidential emergency

requiring committee consideration

within 15 calendar days

after one is introduced

and a floor vote

within three days after that.

But the language

the House Republicans inserted

into their measure on Tuesday

declare that, quote,

each day for the remainder of the 119th Congress shall not constitute a calendar day for the purposes of the emergency that Trump declared on February 1st. So the point we are at right now is is in order to preserve a bunch of tariffs, which are effectively about to fucking obliterate the entire world economy.
Congress has declared that days don't pass?

This is

fucking, this is completely unhinged.

This is fucking like Caligula's horse in the Senate shit.

Like, again, they are literally,

they have literally declared

that calendar days passing

are not actually calendar days so that Trump

can just keep doing tariff shit and rule by fiat?

Like the Israelites,

they have stopped time

in order to win the battle.

It's, it's genuinely

the can just keep doing tariff shit and rule by fiat. Like the Israelites, they have stopped time in order to win the battle.
It's genuinely astonishing. And the extent to which this has kind of just been swept under the rug, the Republicans have been doing this kind of quietly, right? And the fact that Democrats are not literally on TV every single second of every day going, the Republicans are voting to stop time so that Trump can destroy the economy, is astonishing.
It's this real admission by the Republican Congress that they're ceding authority over policy to Trump completely, right? The government now is Trump ruling by sort of fiat and people attempting to sort of run circles around him in courts, which is not you know working enormously well yeah we'll see and and you know and this this is starting to have effects on like investor confidence like in in the in like the u.s as a political entity and the u.s as an economic entity which is unprecedented the other thing i think it's worth noting is that these people like elon musk donald trump the people around them have been saying for a long time that the plan is to cause a recession and that after the recession, things are going to get better and the financial pressure hasn't believed them. And this right now is the period in which they're starting to realize that they were serious about this.
And I don't know what the political ramifications of that are going to be because these are people who actually matter in the political system.

And I think we'll see the ramifications of this play out in the sort of coming weeks and months.

But this is a fucking cliff that we've hit.

And we're now like Wile E. Coyote, like running off the side and trying not to look down.

But on the upside, we have a great new song for everybody.

So who's to say if any of this has been bad? All right, we are back. Speaking of running circles around the courts, we do have a small update.
Re-USA. Last week, in a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court denied an appeal from the Trump administration in a case regarding Trump's attempted federal funds freeze and the shuttering of USAID.
This was a case filed by the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and the Global Health Council. The White House is now required to pay foreign aid contractors for work that has already been completed, and further details will be worked out back in the district court.
And it's still unclear, you know, if the Trump administration is going to abide by the court's ruling and resume all required payments. But this is the first move from the Supreme Court regarding, you know, Trump's actions the past few months.

This has also not stopped Trump from trying to slowly close other entire government agencies.

This very week, the Education Department laid off nearly half of its workforce, over 1,300 employees.

Late Tuesday night, Education Secretary Linda McMahon went on to Fox News to say that this

reduction in force is only the first step towards abolishing the entire education department, saying, quote,

This was the president's mandate. His directive to me, clearly, is to shut down the Department of Education, which we know will have to work with Congress, you know, to get that accomplished.

But what we did today was to take the first step of eliminating what I think is bureaucratic bloat, unquote. Yeah.
And I mean, like, you know, we've talked on this show for a long time how eliminating Department of Education and eventually destroying public education has been a long running goal. Oh, yeah.
Of the most absolutely unhinged of these people who are the people now in charge. And yeah, they've decided to just like individually fuck every child in the u.s it's incredible well and so far the way that they're trying to close up the department of education is kind of in a more uh selective manner because they're still keeping certain parts of the department active yeah on march 10th the education department announced that they were launching investigations into 60 universities for, quote, Title VI violations relating to anti-Semitic harassment and discrimination, unquote.
And this is in relation to anti-genocide protests on campus. And this comes after Trump announced the immediate cancellation of $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University.
the education department is threatening that these other 59 universities may lose their funding

if they do not, quote, enforce Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits any institution that receives federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race, color, and national origin. National origin includes shared Jewish ancestry, unquote.
I don't know what to say here. You get to see all the threads of this admin coming together, right? Which is that, you know, these people are also attempting to effectively destroy like the secondary education system in this country too.
For reasons that are sort of unclear to me, I don't know. But what we're seeing here, right, is the ways that the Democrats sort of like falling into lockstep with the Republicans on backing the genocide in Israel has sort of led to this thing where the Republicans are using this to just straight up obliterate like all of the U.S.'s like political, economic and social institutions.
Well, and specifically with this investigation, they are trying to get all these universities to cooperate in efforts to selectively remove students who have protested against the genocide in Gaza, right? This is the same attack on free speech and free expression that they're doing against Khalil. This is the same exact purpose and now they're trying to get more and more universities to be complicit in the selective

removal of people in this country who choose to express their First Amendment rights, regardless of whether they're a citizen, a green card holder, or on a student visa. So this is all deeply, deeply worrying.
Robert, you have a small segment you want to discuss before we start to close out. yeah just a a little bit at the end here.
So in the subreddit for the 50501 protest campaign,

which is an attempt to do protests in all 50 states simultaneously, right? I think their next

day of action is coming up in April. I'm not giving an opinion on the overall thing, but in

the subreddit, somebody posted claiming to be a National Guard soldier, given kind of his thoughts

Thank you. coming up in April.
I'm not giving an opinion on the overall thing, but in the subreddit, somebody posted claiming to be a National Guard soldier, giving kind of his thoughts on how the National Guard would respond to orders to carry out violence against U.S. citizens.
And I just wanted to chat about this because it's something we talk about on the show pretty regularly. My opinion is that one of the likely ways things come to a head, probably as early as this summer, is that there is mass protests in D.C.
and the Insurrection Act gets used and, you know, the Guard at least are brought in to attempt to crack down. I mean, obviously, Trump has done a version of this before, and Trump and his state attorney have both discussed using the Insurrection Act to crack down on protests.
I think they see D.C. as the place they want to do that.
So it's interesting to me to see a post like this. This is not a thing where, like, I've been able to verify this guy yet.
There's a couple of points that make me think he probably is a National Guardsman. For one thing, there's a lot of them, right? Like, this is not like a National Guardsman.
Where'd you find one? There's a ton of fucking dudes in the National Guard. For the other thing, everything he says is consistent with things that I have seen and talked to other people who are in and were in the Guard about.
There's one little bit where he advises people on, like, stop the bleed gear. And he gives good advice.
He says only buy from NAR, North American Rescue. It's the same advice we would have given.
He cites DOD Directive 1344-10, which is why he believes he's well within his rights to make a post like this. And in essence, what he's saying is that it is his belief that most of the military chain of command from NCOs up to officers would not be down with following illegal orders to fire on U.S.
citizens. But the vast majority of enlisted troops, if fired upon, would get over whatever issues they have with that very quickly, right? That's the gist of it, is that I think, you know, within sort of the officer class and the NCO class, there are a lot of resistance to the idea of the military being used for domestic policing.
That is less clear with kind of the enlisted class who are, you know, a significant chunk of them are very much down for Trump. But whatever sort of divisions exist within enlisted soldiers would fall apart pretty quickly if soldiers were fired upon.
And I think this is probably like assuming this is accurate and I don't really see a reason to doubt it. There's nothing he's

saying here that's crazy. I think this is kind of an interesting thing to keep in mind, that when you're looking at the military, it's not the police.
If I have to have armed agents of the state cracking down on a protest, I'm less worried about people being killed if it's the National Guard in general. But that situation can change very, very rapidly if, like, the situation becomes an active firefight.
And I do think, like, that's a thing we have to consider right now is the possibility that we have U.S. soldiers, whether the National Guard or active duty, engaged openly in shooting at American protesters like that's that's in the cards as early as this summer.
And it's not a fun thing to think about, but I'm seeing more and more not just posts like this, but I'm having more and more conversations with people who are in the military or who were in are in the National Guard about their concerns about what they might be called upon to do. Some of this has to do with the border.
But like it is becoming increasingly common for people in the military to worry about how they are going to be used in the immediate future. We're not talking about years.
We're talking about this summer, right, is when there's a very good chance a lot of stuff comes to a head. So these are things you should be thinking about if you're listening and you are in the military.
These are things that you should be thinking about because the people who are in charge of our government right now have made a lot of statements about how they want to use the military to deal with protests. And the idea that that's going to happen very soon is not not fringe or crazy.
Well, and although these people might have, you know, slightly more discipline when it comes to actual firearms, there is also incidents like in 2020 where the Kentucky Army National Guard killed someone via the misuse of crowd control munitions. I think that is also worth stating even if a Kent State situation maybe is not as like the modern day, there's certainly other other ways to cause grievous harm.
Yes. In these sorts of like protest environments.
And when we've seen, I mean, even in Portland, when we have seen what you witnessed personally, unfortunately, Garrison, the worst injuries to crowd control devices are usually people. In our case, it was federal agents, but who are utilizing crowd control weapons and have not trained on them because they're not there's certain ways you're supposed to and not supposed to use them and these guys are just hey you know how to use a gun you must know how to use the rubber bullet thing you know no if you use like less lethals the way you would use you know a regular firearm yeah it actually leads to like much more like possible lethal consequences or like life-changing consequences yeah which you know police a regular firearm that actually leads to, like, much more, like, possible lethal consequences or, like, life-changing consequences.
Yeah. Which, you know, police are more familiar with the regular use of crowd-controlled munitions than necessarily, you know, like BORTAC or, like, state national guards.
Something that's also, you know, worth keeping in mind. Let's close by my least favorite segment, Stinky Musk, which still has a really bad name.

On Monday, a federal judge ruled that Musk's doge should be subject to comply with FOIA requests and public disclosures of information required of government agencies, with the judge ordering the release of email correspondence between Musk's team and the Office of Management and Budget, and was ordered to, quote, begin producing documents on a rolling basis as soon as practicable, unquote. Now, despite Musk's claims of, quote-unquote, maximum transparency, last month the Trump administration tried to shield Doge from public records requests by labeling the agency's documents as, quote-unquote, presidential records, which carries special protections.
This specific case is super interesting. The judge, a federal judge by the name of Cooper, also critiqued the way that the Trump admin tried to litigate this case.
Quoting from Politico, quote, The lawyers offered virtually nothing in the way of evidence about Doge's operations or management. Indeed, the court wonders whether this decision was strategic, Cooper said, noting that the Trump administration lawyers had taken competing positions, including that Doge qualifies as an agency under some sections of law, but not others when it suits it.
Thus, Doge becomes, on the defendant's view, a Goldilocks entity, Cooper wrote. Not an agency when it's burdensome, but an agency when it's convenient, unquote.
and I do like Cooper's analysis here of how Doge is very selectively

in a it's burdensome, but an agency when it's convenient, unquote. And I do like Cooper's analysis here of how Doge is very selectively an agency only when it causes, you know, benefit to Trump or Musk.
And finally, we have one other Musk story to close out this episode. Admits Tesla's plummeting stock price, protests outside Tesla dealerships, and reports of vandalism of dealerships across the country, Trump has essentially started doing ads for Tesla on the White House driveway.
Upon climbing in a red car that he's not allowed to operate, Trump remarked, Wow, everything is computer. So, this was a very odd and kind of embarrassing show of favoritism where musk brought out like a number of different tesla models and trump got to quote unquote you know pick the one that he wanted to buy uh as he just like sat in on this like televised advertisement for tesla as his you know company is is is losing a shocking amount of money in the in the stock market yeah And there's, I mean in the stock market.
There's literally a picture of him with the notes that he has in really, really giant Like a Tesla sales note bullet point of how much certain models are, what their different features are, which ones have self-driving features included, which ones you have to pay extra for. Yeah, no, he's literally carrying like a Tesla sales pitch as he does this televised appearance, boosting his new best friends and co-president's company.
Trump said on True Social, the radical left lunatics are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the world's greatest automakers, and Elon's baby, in order to attack and do harm to Elon and everything he stands for, unquote. So, now, not only has Trump called the Tesla boycott illegal, which is, you know, its own form of unhinged, but on Tuesday, Trump announced that vandalism of Tesla's will be labeled as domestic terrorism, promising that perpetrators will, quote unquote, go through hell.
White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said, quote, ongoing and heinous acts of violence against Tesla's by radical leftist activists are nothing short of domestic terror, unquote. so that will be fun to see how that plays out i i feel like we're we genuinely are not that far off from just like trump trying to hand down legal mandate saying you must buy a tesla like this is this is the this is the kind of shit that we're in now no this is one of the most like bizarre things i've ever seen if if b or any Democratic president did anything similar to this, you would have like thralls of people screaming for his impeachment.
Similar to like the Eric Adams thing. It's like one of the most blatant open displays of corruption I've ever seen, where a president is using his office to boost like the personal financial interests of one of his top advisors, who's also like running government agencies, essentially, and doing massive, massive cuts to prohibit their ability to like investigate his own businesses, while also taking massive amounts of government money to keep businesses like Tesla and SpaceX operable.
So this has been a pretty, a pretty silly thing to watch unfold the past few days. And now Tesla shares have risen 4% after Trump's support for Musk and

Tesla. Great.
Well, I think that's going to do it here at us with the ED. To play us out, we're

going to refer back to our friend, the Narcissist Cookbook, who put together our lovely new tariff

theme song that you're going to hear every week until tariffs aren't a thing anymore. We reported the news.
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com.

Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here

listed directly in episode descriptions.

Thanks for listening.